Interesting hand-annotated 8.5 x 9.75 color proof of the dust jacket cover and spine for John Steinbeck's collection of World War II articles, Once There Was a War, published by the Viking Press in 1958. Steinbeck writes two brief notations in the right margin in fountain pen—drawing a line to a character that looks like him, writing, "Me and not bad?…J.S.," and pointing out a soldier lighting a pipe, asking, "Who he?" In fine condition, with two horizontal mailing folds.
Steinbeck served as a special war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune from June to December 1943. Rather than writing about battles and generals, he focused on the lives of ordinary people on the front lines—from those doing the actual fighting to those serving in vital support roles for the troops.
In his introduction to Once There Was a War, published some fifteen years after the articles were first published, Steinbeck writes: 'Once upon a time there was a war, but so long ago and so shouldered out of the way by other wars and other kinds of wars that even people who were there are apt to forget. This was that I speak of came after the plate armor and longbows of Crecy and Agincourt and just before the little spitting experimental atom bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I attended a part of that war, you might say visited it, since I went in the costume of a war correspondent and certainly did not fight, and it is interesting to me that I do not remember very much about it. Reading these old reports sent in with excitement at the time brings back images and emotions completely lost.'
