This 1955 letter from John Steinbeck to Marilyn Monroe has been making the rounds on Facebook in the last few days, so we thought we’d join the party. It’s a sweet letter, somewhat bashful, and it was found in the superstar’s personal archive, and sold for $3,250 at Julien’s in 2016. Steinbeck humbly, even grovelingly requests a “girlish” photo for his nephew. Did she send the photo to the lovestruck boy, Jon Atkinson? We’ll never know, but she valued enough to keep it till her dying day.
Author: Cynthia Haven
Cynthia Haven has written for The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, World Literature Today, and other publications. Her work has also appeared in Le Monde, La Repubblica, The Kenyon Review, Quarterly Conversation, The Georgia Review, Civilization, and others. She has been a Milena Jesenská Journalism Fellow with the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. Peter Dale in Conversation with Cynthia Haven was published in London, 2005. Her Czestaw Mitosz: Conversations was published in 2006; Joseph Brodsky: Conversations in 2003; An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czestaw Mitosz was published in 2011 with Ohio University Press / Swallow Press. She is currently a visiting scholar at Stanford. Her biography René Girard, A Life will be published next year.
Join me at twitter: @chaven
View all posts by Cynthia Haven
This 1955 letter from John Steinbeck to Marilyn Monroe has been making the rounds on Facebook in the last few days, so we thought we’d join the party. It’s a sweet letter, somewhat bashful, and it was found in the superstar’s personal archive, and sold for $3,250 at Julien’s in 2016. Steinbeck humbly, even grovelingly requests a “girlish” photo for his nephew. Did she send the photo to the lovestruck boy, Jon Atkinson? We’ll never know, but she valued enough to keep it till her dying day.