ALS signed “John,” one page, 7.25 x 10.5, Hotel Plaza, Stockholm letterhead, July 25, 1947. Handwritten letter to his friend, actor Burgess Meredith, in full: “Your letters were received just before I left Paris. The french are a very immoral people. But Honest Jake Pfaff made Gwyn a very beautiful dress—walk upstairs and save $5. Stockholm is a fine town. There is a report here that you are going to play Winterset here. Is this true? We leave Monday for Uncle Joe’s [Joseph Stalin] Cabin. Have no idea what we will find there but I hope it is all right. Capa is in good shape. Now he is in the country photographing farmers and farmers' daughters I guess. I hope your opening is triumphant and it is bound to be. I wish it were my play. For two days I have been out amongst the archipelago sporting about in a boat and i feel very good. Boats are fine things. If you need to get word to me it can be ℅ Joe Newman, Herald Tribune Bureau, Moscow. Try it! It will be interesting to see whether it gets through. Good luck and love to Paulette.” In very good to fine condition, with some light creasing.
Steinbeck and photographer Robert Capa flew from Paris to Stockholm on July 21st, with Steinbeck remaining in the country until joining his friend in Moscow at month’s end. Determined to produce an eyewitness account of everyday life in Stalin’s Soviet Union, the pair journeyed along the so-called Vodka Circuit—Moscow, Kiev, Stalingrad, and Georgia—for 40 days between July 31 and mid-September 1947, documenting the people and landscapes they encountered. Neither Capa nor Steinbeck naturally gravitated towards collaborative endeavors. The affinity between their creative approaches, however, resulted in what was both of their most successful collaborations. Capa returned from the trip with almost four thousand negatives, and Steinbeck with several hundred pages of notes. Their efforts resulted in the 1948 book A Russian Journal, which, according to Steinbeck, attempted ‘honest reporting, to set down what we saw and heard with editorial comment, without drawing conclusions about things we didn’t know sufficiently.’
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