At Steinbeck’s Getaway as Heirs’ Feud Revives

The New York Times discusses Steinbeck's Sag Harbor home, the 50th anniversary of his bestselling travel memoir, Travels with Charley, and the continuing feuds of his descendants.

From the piece...

The tall oaks described in the book are a half-century older, but still shading the expansive, grassy bluff. At the entrance to the kitchen remain the marks where Steinbeck recorded the height of each guest to the cottage, including the poodle, Charley. Japanese tourists show up in droves and lone looky-loos wander without permission, gawking at the writer’s shack where Steinbeck wrote “Travels” and other works, and at the quirky touches he left, like the statue of a unicorn.

But the house Steinbeck called “my little fishing place,” about a mile out of town, is part of a long-running and bitter family estate battle, pitting the surviving sister of the author’s third wife, Elaine, against his oldest son and a granddaughter. While the sister, Jean Boone, said she had decided against preserving the home as a historic site or museum because her family enjoyed vacationing there, the son, Thomas Steinbeck, said he could imagine the house as a writer’s school or haven but not a museum, saying his father would think that silly. It remains unclear who will be allowed to decide its future.

“The house belongs to Steinbeck’s blood heirs,” Thomas Steinbeck, 65, insisted in a telephone interview from his home in Santa Barbara, Calif.

Mrs. Boone, 81, insisted just as forcefully: “The house belongs to me. Elaine left it to me, and I’m leaving it to my family.” She said the property was left to her in a trust.

And so continues a family feud worthy of a Steinbeck novel.



For more on Steinbeck's time in Sag Harbor, I found this story in Hampton Style.

From that piece...

"I grow into this countryside with a lichen grip," John Steinbeck famously said about Sag Harbor, the place the novelist appears to have felt most at home. For the man who experienced lifelong restlessness, however, John Steinbeck's peace in Sag Harbor was to be equal parts hard-earned pleasure and crutch. In his personal life, Sag Harbor provided him with a full existence. He often sailed his boat, Fayre Eleyne, named for his beloved wife, Elaine, and lazed with his family in the ripe afternoons of late summer. Before writing in the morning, he liked to fraternize with the leathery, salt-caked fisherman, drinking coffee with them over their man's-man talk. It energized him to connect with the locals. John was much beloved by his neighbors here, and the affection was returned.

His adoptive home was the setting for both fictional New Baytown from The Winter of our Discontent and the starting and ending point of Travels with Charley, John's best-selling travelogue chronicling his cross-country voyage with canine companion Charley. He penned The Winter of Our Discontent in Joyous Garde, his studio overlooking the sea at their Bluff Point home, where the writer kept a stack of sharpened pencils in his hexagonal, supremely private work space. "I designed a cute little structure, six-sided, with windows looking in all directions ... It will look like a little lighthouse," beamed John, about the inception of his studio.