Los Gatos Weekly-Times Steinbeck wrote his great work in local hills Kathryn Morgan, Los Gatos High School teacher and town planning commissioner, continues with the second of her two-part look at the writers in Los Gatos' past The first part ran last week in this space. She originally presented the material last month as a speech during the Town Library's centennial celebration--Editor By Kathryn Morgan Rutherford Montgomery--a far less dramatic and more gentle Los Gatos writer than Ambrose Bierce or Charles Erskine Scott Wood--both of whom were mentioned last week-- wrote 132 books for young people about wildlife and domestic animals. His books had titles like The Mystery of Crystal Canyon and The Black Stallion and Wolf Dog. Montgomery's work, which won him a Jack London Award and a Newberry Prize, was so successful that, as John Baggerly tells it, he would point to shelves and shelves of books in his house at 33 Walnut and say, "I can't read a one of those." They were editions of all his books that had been translated into foreign languages. Monty worked for Walt Disney Studios for a time, and two of his books, Weecha and The Hound Who Thought He Was a Raccoon, were made into Disney films. John Steinbeck--A giant among Los Gatos writers, and, indeed, all writers, was the fiercely compassionate John Steinbeck. He and his first wife, Carol Henning, moved here in the mid-'30s from his parents' tiny but rent-free cottage in foggy Pacific Grove. Here Steinbeck kept up an unrelenting schedule of writing and submitting to his publisher, but remained a penniless collector of rejection slips. He and Carol moved to an 800-square foot house in what is now Monte Sereno on Greenwood Lane, just off Highway 9 near Ridgecrest Avenue. It was there that he finished the touching, simple book that was to rocket him to fame in literature, theater and film: a Depression-era story of cruelty, loneliness, displaced working men and shining friendship, the short but unforgettable novel, Of Mice and Men. An old friend of Steinbeck's told of knocking on Steinbeck's cottage door. Steinbeck answered, pale and obviously disturbed. His puppy had literally eaten half of the only original, handwritten copy of Of Mice and Men. Steinbeck later wrote about the incident, "I was pretty mad. But the poor fellow may have been acting critically." He rewrote it from memory. Fortunately, the devoured manuscript was Mice rather than the huge The Grapes of Wrath, which might have killed the dog to eat and Steinbeck to rewrite. The Grapes of Wrath--that giant, painfully researched and documented social document of how the Depression and the Dust Bowl drove thousands of desperate people to seek work in the paradise of California, where they were shunned, underpaid, overworked, housed in filthy conditions and treated like dirt; the Nobel Prize-winner that helped wake the indignant denials and conscience of our nation; the immortalizer of Henry Fonda playing the part of Tom Joad in the film version--was written in a few short, disciplined, hot summer months in that unpretentious cottage in Monte Sereno. The firestorm of notoriety and fame that followed wrought many changes in Steinbeck's life in Los Gatos. The cottage already had a name. A tribute to the culinary skills of his Italian neighbors, he called it "Arroyo del Ajo," which means "Gulch of the Garlic." But after fame struck, he had to put up a fence, which people would peek through. One mother had her daughter do her precious Shirley Temple imitation in Steinbeck's front yard in hopes that he would rocket her to Hollywood. There was also apparently a woman stalker, who lurked day and night. Then Los Gatos and Monte Sereno began to grow, and all at once other houses were constructed all around his own. He wrote, "The noise is driving us nuts." So, with the money from Grapes, the Steinbecks bought acreage and a ranchhouse up in the Santa Cruz Mountains off Brush Road. "It has 47 acres and a spring. It has a forest and an orchard and pasture and big trees. ... It's one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen. ... It's so beautiful that I am often embarrassed to be living here." Steinbeck would frequently go into Los Gatos to the post office to send telegrams to his publishers. Almost always he was forced to rewrite his messages completely before Western Union would send them--people could not use swear words in telegrams then. After a grumbling rewrite, Steinbeck would go across the street to the Lyndon Hotel bar and have a drink or two while awaiting a reply. There is also a tale about how Steinbeck took guests Charlie Chaplin and director John Ford out to dinner and drinks at the Hotel Lyndon. When Steinbeck's marriage to Carol, an excellent editor and title creator (she took The Grapes of Wrath from "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," and, I believe, Of Mice and Men from Robert Burns' poem, "To A Mouse, upon turning up her nest with a plough") broke up, Steinbeck sold the ranch, moved to New York, spent a year in England, and eventually went on the road for Travels with Charley. After he died in 1968, his ashes were sent back home to Salinas, where they rest beside much of his mother's family, characters immortalized in his novel East of Eden. But for a while he lived with us in our little foothill town. Jack Kerouac--Jack Kerouac, who wrote the quintessential book of the 1950's beat generation, On the Road, did not live in Los Gatos, but he visited often. On the Road is about two men, Sal Paradise (modeled after Kerouac himself) and Dean Moriarty (modeled after Kerouac's best friend, Neal Cassidy), who travel through the United States searching for religious truth and a more meaningful, less materialistic, more non-conformist sense of values than was generally found in post-war America. It was Kerouac's soul mate, Neal Cassidy who, with his wife Carolyn and their children, lived in a California ranchhouse in Monte Sereno. That house, as reported in the Weekly-Times a few months ago, has now been demolished. This has been only a sampling of lore about writers associated with our town. Many other writers are scribbling (or keyboarding) away in Los Gatos even as you read this, and it is to be hoped that tales of their homes, lives, work and loves will also become part of Los Gatos folklore. [ Back to Contents Page | Los Gatos Weekly-Times Home Page | Archives ] This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, November 11, 1998. ©1998 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.