DOCUMENT: Celebrity, Investigation

John Steinbeck And The FBI's Wrath

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John Steinbeck And The FBI's Wrath

Thirty years after John Steinbeck's death, a new museum dedicated to the writer opened in late-June in his hometown of Salinas, California. The National Steinbeck Center commemorates a remarkable career that saw the author produce classics like "The Grapes of Wrath," "East of Eden," and "Of Mice and Men." It was these and other blunt portraits of the American West that apparently caught the FBI's eye, according to these two memos. Anyone who wrote so powerfully about poverty and despair, the bureau thought, was probably a Commie. (3 pages)