Of mice and men and women

The latest chapter began last month when two heirs, Thomas Steinbeck and Blake Smyle, Steinbeck’s son and granddaughter, sued the estate of his third wife, Elaine, and McIntosh & Otis, a New York literary agency that represented Steinbeck. Steinbeck, whose sons were born in his second marriage — to Gwyndolyn Conger — and Elaine, who had a daughter from a previous marriage, married in 1950 and had no children of their own. She died in April 2003 at 88. In the complaint filed in US District Court for the Southern District, in New York, Thomas Steinbeck, known as Thom, and Smyle, the daughter of the writer’s younger son, John Steinbeck IV, allege that Elaine and the agents ‘‘engaged in a 30-year hidden conspiracy to deprive John Steinbeck’s blood heirs of their rights in the intellectual properties of John Steinbeck.’’ They seek damages of $10 million and $8 million, respectively. John IV, who wrote of his struggles with addiction, died during surgery for a herniated disk in 1991 at 44.

The roots of the Steinbecks’ legal troubles reach back to the will Steinbeck wrote shortly before his death, in which he left most of his estate, valued at over $1 million, to Elaine. To his sons he left $50,000 each. He directed future profits from his works to go to his wife and a lawyer. His will said nothing of copyrights.

Under copyright law at the time of his death, children and spouses of writers had interests in the renewal of copyrights. In 1981, Steinbeck’s sons sued Elaine, claiming that she had renewed some copyrights in their name, but kept the royalties. The suit was settled in 1983, and the terms of the settlement are sealed. When she died last year, Elaine left her estate, including her copyrights of her late husband’s works, to two sisters, her daughter and several grandchildren, none of whom are biologically related to the writer. The current suit questions whether Elaine, who it says was motivated by jealousy of her stepsons, properly exercised renewal rights for her late husband’s works, and whether the heirs were properly informed of their interests in those rights. It claims she acted in violation of the 1983 agreement.

‘‘The whole story has a tragic arc to it,’’ said Jonathan Zittrain, an assistant professor of intellectual property law at Harvard. ‘‘This isn’t Disney versus Miramax. These are the heirs to arguably one of America’s greatest writers fighting over his legacy,’’ he said. While the suit involves copyright law, many of Steinbeck’s and Smyle’s allegations were factual in nature — ‘‘who did what when’’, Zittrain said.

According to the suit, Steinbeck was ‘‘an author who cared little for business matters, including his intellectual property’’ and so he neglected to say how his copyrights should pass, a view not shared by all. ‘‘I think he wanted to leave them enough so they wouldn’t starve, but not so much so they wouldn’t have to make lives for themselves,’’ said Jackson J. Benson, who spent 13 years researching and writing The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer. ‘‘The main thing was he didn’t want to screw up the boys’ lives by leaving them all that money. The irony is, the boys did go after it.’’

Material wealth, and a lack of it, contributed greatly to Steinbeck’s vision as a writer. In stories, the Stanford University-educated writer returned again and again to characters shaped by economic deprivation, at times romanticising them — like the well-intentioned ne’er-do-wells in Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row — and at others, laying bare their suffering — like that of the destitute Oklahomans displaced by the Dust Bowl in The Grapes of Wrath — and almost always revealing their dignity.

After his successes piled up, Steinbeck recalled his lean years in the 1920s in New York City, where he had worked briefly pushing a wheelbarrow on the construction site of Madison Square Garden, and in California. ‘‘I had $25 a month and I was one of the rich ones,’’ he wrote in 1955 in The New York Times about his life on Cannery Row in Monterey, Calif. ‘‘In our group of denizens, we had no envy for the rich. We didn’t know any rich. We thought everyone lived the way we lived, if we thought of it at all.’’

Once Steinbeck experienced financial success, he began worrying about future income, although ‘‘it does seem odd as we read through Journal of a Novel to find a man who buys a piano on impulse also worrying about money,’’ Benson wrote. Steinbeck had little cause for concern. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, and even as wide critical acclaim eluded East of Eden in his lifetime, it generated strong sales and still does, like the other Steinbeck works that have become staples of the classroom.

(NYT)