John Steinbeck’s estate urged to let the world read his shunned werewolf novel
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
It's not so clear cut here; Steinbeck submitted it for publishing, got rejected, then seemingly spent years improving his art and produced his major works.
I certainly don't blame him for not wanting to throw a werewolf murder mystery out there after being recognized for what he must consider his "real" work. But it was commonplace to destroy unwanted manuscripts or simply to say, don't publish it, or destroy it when I die, etc, and he didn't. To me it seems like license to print, as long as the context is explained in a good introduction. Scholars of the American novel will go nuts for it.
Tolkien's is an interesting case, for with the Silmarillion he obviously wanted to publish it (he considered it a much better work than the Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings) but he also could never get it completed. His son took over and did his best to compile it. I suspect his Beowulf was similar - he did not feel it was up to his standards.
At some point after death, and with due consideration to the heirs and others, I think the historical value of these things outweighs the personal.
As a counterexample, there was the Xscape album from Michael Jackson where they took decades-old demos, had producers make them sound like modern songs, and put his face and name on the cover like it was just a new album. (also the songs mostly suck) That seems like it benefits no one besides Sony.
article: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/poetry/bukowksis-poems-wer...
> What a commentary. In France I am the father of a literary movement. In Europe I am considered the best modern American, and among the first of all writers. In America, I eke out a hack's motion picture wages by winning second prize in a manufactured mystery story contest
http://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2012/05/faulkner-vs-well...
I read Faulkner's story and honestly the ending wasn't as satisfying as he might have thought. Wellman's story was probably better as a "murder mystery" even if the writing perhaps lacked some of Faulkner's polish. I thought some of Faulkner's other mysteries were better
At the time he would have written it, he was quite hungry. Living off of income from manual labor with some extra contributions from his father. Perhaps he thought a warewolf mystery could sell a few books at the time, but as you suggest, later on that would've been embarrassing.
Makes me think of how Stephen King wrote some novels as Richard Bachman and then with King's name on them, they sold ten times as many.
Also, allegedly J K Rowling wrote a crime novel as Robert Galbraith which sold only 1500 copies.
Although perhaps this was exactly what you meant.
Note that that category includes the Silmarillion, which was cobbled together by his son Christopher. And Christopher rarely chose his father's latest efforts, preferring instead versions more compatible with the published Lord of the Rings.
Christopher was chosen by his father for the job of literary executor. It's arguable whether JRR Tolkien really wanted him to publish every scrap the way he did, but they do form an extraordinary documentation of the extraordinary process of Tolkien's imagination.
His Beowulf could be tinkered with forever because it's not really a translation. It's a hook on which to hang a lengthy series of scholarly footnotes, discussing almost every single word of the original.
If you want to read Beowulf in translation, pick any other version. (I adore Maria Dahvana Headley's hilarious, insightful new version.) If you want to read Beowulf in the original, and want an exhaustive discussion of how it works, pick Tolkien's book -- which also includes a helpful prose gloss.
One can control one's estate while alive. Once dead, the estate belongs to others, one's intent no longer incurs any obligation for others to adhere to.
If someone never wants their manuscripts published, they should destroy them while they are alive.
P.S. It took me a long time to get over the desire to please my father in what I did with his estate. You can't please dead people.
Then why are wills permitted and enforced?
I'd agree that the only way to guarantee something is not published is to destroy it. One need look no further than the Barnes Foundation to see that executors can go astray; but that doesn't make it right.
Wills are for the living, not the dead. It is a coordination mechanism to reduce conflict between heirs. It obviously doesn't function perfectly, but otherwise every death would result in legal battles, or, as has been the case for most of recorded history, physical violence.
Also note there are significant legal restrictions on wills: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities
Wills distribute the estate. Once it's distributed, the new owners can do what they want with it.
> Barnes Foundation
"to be honored in perpetuity after his death"
Such things should not be legally binding. What can justify a person controlling their estate a year after death, a century, a millennium? It's absurd.
> Such things should not be legally binding.
They aren't. They never have been, and they never will be, since it's impossible to enforce something forever.
But see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities .
If he really wanted it destroyed, he definitely had experience.
The greediness of the contemporary public is really off-putting. It reminds me of how we dig up mummies and place them in museums; completely disregarding the actual human beings that lived and their cultural-religious beliefs, all so that we can stare at them in a museum for 30 seconds.
So that we can study them, learn from them, and let them tell us their stories, so that they truly live on after death.
I could see an argument made for modern remains as there are living people/descendants who have a strong connection with the burial beliefs and practices. But make no mistake, even in that case it is about the living and not the dead.
The modern world has no respect for anything.
Nothing we do today affects those people or their beliefs in any way. Those people no longer exist and cannot be harmed or protected. Ideas about respect and proper behavior around their landmarks only affects people who are alive. It is only important to the extent that it is important to us. It is clearly important to you but not others. So why should it matter to others if it doesn’t?
I hate to use this example, but your argument would also basically say a genocided people is completely unimportant and unworthy of respect, as they no longer exist either.
Aside from the obvious problem of their being living people who experienced the holocaust (so they still exist), this example seems to imply that I'm saying that there's no need for empathy and respect for the people who came before us. I don't think that anything I've said implies that. Instead what I'm saying is that the dead need no protection and can receive no pain or insult. Anything we do for "them" is really for "us", because they do not exist.
>Because it’s a simple matter of recognizing other human beings and respecting their cultural achievements and desires. Just because they don’t exist anymore doesn’t mean they weren’t humans worthy of our empathy.
You seem to be implying that not honoring the wishes of the dead is an empathic failure. How so? I can empathize with someone's wishes, understand where they are coming from, and even respect who they were. None of that implies that I owe their desires a place in the world now. And in fact as modern people we MUST make choices about what pieces of the past to revere, revise, or pave over. Otherwise the world becomes a mausoleum to the past.
Case in point: the people who've actually died in said genocide cannot have any feelings about what we do about them, so to consider those feelings would be nonsense (according to the person-affecting view).
Of course, if someone living (such as yourself) cares about this, then it would still make sense to care about it, since the feelings of an actually living person are concerned.
To me the long dead are meaningless, and the recently dead are mostly so. I have the utmost respect for the living, and those who are recently dead have people who care about their legacy. But the farther you go back you go, the less direct connection the dead have with the present, and the simple fact is that the dead are gone.
Our preferred projection of them in our own image?
Or a meeting-in-the-middle between you and an individual's preferred presentation of themselves?
One of the reasons the Git version control system caught on is that it lets you rewrite history...
There’s also something kafkesque about the way his stories weren’t destroyed, which makes me think that the story isn’t as simple as it seems.
https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/articles/12-fem...
I'll happily concede he wrote a werewolf story, but since it was never available as a book, I would not call it a novel.
We don't know that. It could be a viral laughingstock that becomes the new primary association the public holds for the author (I doubt it, but never say never). If he didn't want it released, I'd say honor his wishes.
But after reading Douglas Adam’s, I’m personally hesitant to read unpublished item from any other authors. After finishing The Salmon of Doubt I felt vaguely embarrassed, like I’d barged into his house and found him relaxing on the couch in his boxers. I’m a fan, not a scholar, and there were reasons he wasn’t ready to share the material yet.
If he'd published it himself in that state, I'd have found it embarrassing.
But as a posthumous memorial that I knew from the outset would be unpolished, it was fine and a bit sad knowing it's never be finished.
I think comes down to how well you're able to keep focus on that what you're reading is unfinished, and enjoying the glimpse of something raw.
Not saying that the parts of the story that have been published might not have needed some additional polish, too, but wouldn't the major reason simply be the fact that the whole thing wasn't yet finished as in "the story just stops mid-way"?
Anyway, wait until you find out what he used to do in the bathroom.
Well put.
This feels like some bizarre end game of "information wants to be free" where instead of railing against content owners expecting to be paid for content people are railing against the idea that content creators can have any control over their creations whatsoever.
To be clear: an artist's control of a work ends once it is in the hands of their audience.
The dead is gone, there is no difference for them if their image, or their bodies are disrespected.
Majority of people dying were civilians.
Once I am dead though, there is no me here to respect any more. Death is complete separation from this world. The vast majority of people who have ever died are completely lost to memory, whether they wanted that fate or not. And for those we do still remember, they’re long past having the ability to care at all what happens to what they left behind. Whether through nothingness or an afterlife, they are no longer here.
We've evolved to care about our descendants, not our ancestors.
No ancient Egyptian Pharaoh would be happy with being dug up and placed in a glass box in a museum. They didn’t build the pyramids because they were bored or wanted people to visit them as tourist attractions. To the very real human beings of ancient Egypt, becoming an anthropological exhibit would be deeply troubling, a massively negative outcome.
At some point after death we should acknowledge we no longer have moral claims on the world.
That's the Hollywood narrative. Archaeology points to them being free men. Though nobody knows for sure.
Denying the owners profits and the curious the chance to indulge their curiosity for the benefit of people a thousand years dead is a derangement of moral priorities. We should care more about the living than the long dead. We can learn from and about them.
He and I think it's also just outright wrong to hide archaeological details from future generations for the sake of the long dead. It sounds like you disagree with us, but the argument that we should respect their wishes just because they wished them is not a strong one, given that we reject some wishes on a case by case basis as morally repugnant.
What is it about this wish in particular that should be respected more than other wishes?
I feel like there’s enough massively disappointing outcomes to go around.
I mean, after all, everyone ends up dead at the end of the day and we can barely take care of the living.
No, they were prestige products.
Even if I was, I'd be dead when it actually came about. The implication of time-travelling morality is an interesting but problematic one. There's no one actually suffering from the act of desecration, since suffering requires one to be alive.
I mean, people are going to go through my stuff. They'll find sex toys, for example. Maybe my family will be able to be comfortable if they are able to profit from my stuff, or someone in the future find my stuff and get some satisfaction.
Again, though, I'll be dead.
You know whose feelings are probably hurt right now, though? Like, picture yourself as a budding werewolf novelist, the sort of person who went to the University of Kansas and got a Bachelor's of Fine Arts in English Literature with a minor in Werewolf Studies, and you've just finished your first werewolf novel, and you're really proud of it, and you have a stack of rejection letters saying that the market isn't really interested in this sort of thing right now. And now, all of a sudden, you see everybody losing their mind over John Steinbeck's werewolf novel. He didn't even want to write it! He didn't want it published! But the world is clamoring for it, and your novel sits in a file drawer. I'm sure there's someone out there like that right now.
Wait, no, that's exactly what it takes for evil to prevail! Rats, I suppose there's nothing we can do, then.
You need to additionally be part of the good men cabal. Simply be bad and do absolutely nothing
One's involuntary submission to the whims of the living is part of the process of death. If one does anything even remotely notable you can be assured that society will want something to do with it. There's no point in chastising the entire world because of it.
Unless you’re a Nihilist and Darwinist, I assume you think some values are more important than others?
And indeed, I think a lot of aspects of culture are dumb and that society would be better off without. It would be better if the world returned to the basics instead of endlessly wrapping itself around an axle of contrivances.
I think you have some odd definitions.
If you follow Parfit, you choose that the latter kind is the only kind to care about, and so caring about burials for the sake of the one buried would be nonsensical to you.
Not sure elephants, among other species, would agree.
The elephants might not agree but I'm certain that the cheetahs, tigers, hyenas, and all the other predators of the world would
I'm not sure that is a right that anyone has.
Of course a person can suffer embarrassment before they've died. This is exactly why we should publish whatever we like after death. If it became the norm for famous authors to have their manuscripts raided for interesting works, then such authors will do a better job of not having manuscripts survive their death, solving these silly disputes once and for all.
Good page turner if you like that sort of thing. The characters are part of a minor connected set of stories, largely orbiting around a character Holly Gibney, which are also easy entertaining reading.
This isn't true as the article states earlier that Murder at Full Moon – has survived unseen in an archive ever since being rejected for publication in 1930.
As this was never published, how does copyright law affect it? Will the estate have no say in the matter when the novel becomes 96 years old in a few years?
But once the copyright runs out then the publisher can publish it regardless, and a viewer could quietly copy it and publish it, unless someone in the estate made altered copies for anyone viewing it, then the altered copies would have fresh copyright, confusing the whole issue.
I am incorrect: https://copyright.cornell.edu/publicdomain
It is lifetime of the author + 70 years.
[1] https://www.lib.purdue.edu/uco/CopyrightBasics/basics.html
Under modern copyright law, if it's a qualified work, and it's recorded, copyright begins then. No intent to publish or special marking or registration or other such ceremony is required. Marking and registration do have benefits in lawsuits about infringement, however.
For works created before the modern automatic copyright, other rules probably apply.
This was written before 1978, was not published before then, and not published before 2003 either, so it is protected by copyright for 70 years after Steinbeck's death: he died in 1968, so through 2038.
As to the hypothetical unpublished work that the publisher takes and publishes as their own: with newly-created work nowadays its easy: the work was copyrighted at "fixation," no need to publish or intend to publish. Before 1978, the author had state-level common-law copyright in unpublished works that would have applied.
They don't. It's currently in the Harry Ransom Center archives at UT. https://lithub.com/john-steinbeck-wrote-a-werewolf-murder-my...
We're not talking personal or private matters here, we're talking something that would have been published if a publisher had said yes at the time. There's obviously a remuneration aspect and the wishes of the author and heirs should be taken into account, but as some point those diminish.
Birth + 70 years or 10 years after death, whichever is later, would be more reasonable.
Books can wait around for 70 years to be handled/digitized, but lots of other works are being lost (or are being preserved "illegally").
Is everyone here aware that this would apply to any source code we write too? If an author writes a private book for his/her SO, that would pass into public domain because the copyright s/he gave to the SO would go away at time of death. I'm assuming that would mean we could not assign rights to source code to our family while we are alive. (Or anyone else come to think of it?) Since those rights go away when we die. This would change a lot. It would change almost everything.
I don't think so.
They need to find alternate business models, like getting paid in advance by fans through something like patreon or kickstarter.
However, while the copyright system still exists its damage to the culture should be minimized by letting cultural works go in to the public domain upon the author's death. The public good far outweighs the earning potential of people who didn't even create the work to begin with.
It's a messy business and there is no single way it should be done. New authors need to prove themselves somehow. And they should be compensated for their works.
They'll need to make a pitch and show me some of their work, then if I like it and I can afford it, then yes, I would.
Getting one's work out there has never been easier.
It used to be that in order to be a photographer you had to buy an expensive camera and have access to a darkroom, or at least spend money to get your photos developed. Now you can take high quality photos with your phone, that everyone has, and no development is needed. So more people than ever are taking photos, many of them artistic. There's no shortage of photography and unless civilization collapses, never will be. If anything, there'll be more and more photography every year, and sharing it has gotten easier than ever.
The same is even more true of video, which used to be even more expensive to create than photos, but now is just as easy and virtually free.
Same with desktop publishing ever since cheap personal printers became available. It used to be that you had to either own a printing press or pay to have someone print your work for you. Now you can print it yourself on your personal printer, or just put it up online, skipping the printing step.
Digital art creation programs have made creating visual art way more affordable, as now you don't have to pay for expensive physical art supplies.
Same with digital music creation tools, etc...
The many digital distribution platform, from Facebook, to Instagram, to Etsy, to Amazon have made publishing one's art super easy too. There's less need than ever for agents, publishers, or other middle men.
All together, this has led to an enormous amount of creativity and art creation, with probably hundreds of millions of people becoming creators compared to what existed just 40 years ago, before the personal computer revolution or the internet boom.
So I'm not worried in the least about art. There'll always be more than enough of it to go around.
I'd love it if creators got paid for their work, but it's not at all essential for art to live or thrive. More than enough artists will continue to make art regardless.
There's more art than ever, but yet the ability to have a legal protection in order to make money on your art is somehow a problem? How?
Meanwhile, there's no right to make money. It's an artificial scarcity model that mostly benefits corporations and middlemen along with a small minority of extremely popular artists, and once the artists die it doesn't even benefit them either but does continue to benefit corporations and middlemen.
If creators want to keep control of their work they shouldn't publish it at all, but once they do there should be no artificial legal framework to imprison people that copy or share it.
However, artists can still get paid by asking to be paid in advance through sites like patreon and kickstarter.
For the rest, they can remain hobbyists.. and I see absolutely nothing wrong with that. As I said before, there's no shortage of art.
In the system I'm advocating for, no one gets sent to jail and no one's lives are getting ruined for copying or sharing bit, art continues to be made, and artists continue to get paid (though now in advance rather than a legally mandated system of artificial scarcity).
Outside a very tiny proportion of best sellers you need to expend significant efforts on promotion if the income matters to you.
This is not new, or unique to literature, and never has been.
Which brings us back to the question of whether you'll back someone you have no knowledge of.
Because you're basically asking them to do some work for you for free to start with. And if they can't afford to do free work, etc, etc.
It's just a cycle.
And while there is a lot of material being produced, not all of it is good. Publishers and the like used to act as curators to a degree. Now I have to do my own curation from not just what's passed the previous barriers, but from everything.
Sorry, no one has time for that.
You don't need to be your own curator. There are plenty of curators out there that aren't publishers, but just people who choose to promote or feature art based on their own personal taste -- which is pretty much what traditional curators like publishers did, but now that power is no longer concentrated in just a few hands, but anyone can do it, and many do.
So you just have to find those curators whose taste is compatible with your own.. those could be friends whose taste you trust, or even people you don't know who like the sorts of things you do.
We no longer have to bow down to the whims of those who live in an ivory tower. Curation has been distributed.
Of course, you might still have to curate the curators, but there are curators of curators too.. like articles on the "best blogs" or various awards to content aggregators, or, again, friends who can recommend you stuff.
The core problem is information overload, and no one has an ultimate solution to it yet, but I'd much rather have today's world of an incredible amount of information, cultural production, and content, than yesterday's world of relatively little content trickling through a few gatekeeper priests.
"you're basically asking them to do some work for you for free to start with. And if they can't afford to do free work, etc, etc."
I'm not asking them for anything. Many artists naturally make art, writers write, etc.. and it's just a fact that a huge amount of them publish their creations for free.
Artists now realize that because of the information and content glut their problem is mostly one of getting noticed, so they'll release plenty of work for free.
I'm not asking them for it, but many are almost trying to force it on me (and everyone else).. trying to get more eyeballs on it, because they realize that once they've got an established fanbase they can monetize it and become more famous and successful... and once they are then the patreon/kickstarter model becomes viable.
Not everyone can do it, but, too bad. If they can't then they can remain a hobbyist or just keep their art to themselves (as I have throughout most of my life).
I'd love to have a utopia where every artist gets paid to create and do nothing else, but copyright has absolutely failed to bring us there, and it's becoming less viable as a means of helping the vast majority of creators every day. It's mostly the lucky few and the middlemen that get to successfully play that game. Instead of propping up this broken system we should be working to find new alternatives which don't rely on artificial scarcity or putting sharers in jail.
Finally I think it would greatly decrease the quantity and quality because frankly your time would be better spent elsewhere on things that can support you financially.
Thankfully, it's never going to happen so it's a bit of a hypothetical conversation.
Disney shouldn't own Star Wars now, to pick one example. Everyone should own it. Any person or company who wants to try to make a go at financing and selling a new entry, or a re-make, should be free to. Film-makers who grew up on it and want to put their spin on it without having to get permission first, should be able to try.
Companies still making sequels to or remakes of 80s games should have to face competition from others trying to make better sequels or remakes of those games.
The best recorded version of the Beatles' oeuvre might well be one that won't ever exist now, because the person who'd have made it couldn't have made made any money at it, and died or will die of old age before the copyright expires, even though they weren't born when Let it Be was released.
I hesitate to name a number (14 seems fine, though, and 28 not catastrophic if you want a longer duration that covers a large portion of a normal person's working adult life) but what we've got now is way too long.
So no thanks.
Years later, someone takes it now it's free from copyright, uses it and achieves popularity. The original creator is still alive and has had nothing back.
Even further, if it has no copyright huge companies like spotify would not have to pay any royalties at all to sell or distribute music, pocketing everything themselves.
I'd rather the creator got the money.
I'm not seeing the part where the possibility that one's work might flop for a decade or three and then be made a smash-hit by someone else keeps people from creating almost exactly as much original art as they do now. I'd expect the effect on behavior to be negligible, especially with terms closer to 30 years. Meanwhile it would free up an awful lot of material for creative inspiration. I have no doubt that would result in more good art, overall.
I'm not disputing that it would give an increase in creativity, but it would open countless doors for huge corporations to completely exploit creatives. You're encouraging a situation where it becomes completely nonviable to be an artist commercially. It's already bad enough as it is at the moment with Spotify et all pocketing the vast majority of proceeds.
It's shocking to me that you're willing to completely overlook the fairness of the system in return for 'more art'. It is not appropriate whatsoever to strip ANYONE of their ownership of a piece of art they have created. Why do you feel entitled to that?
Are you genuinely unaware of the arguments that got us the invention of copyright in the first place, or are you aware of them and just asking me to quote them?
[EDIT] in case it's the former, let me just note that it's very much not obvious or in any sense "natural" that a person who hums a tune they just thought up gets to keep anyone else who heard them from humming it, in any context or for any reason, including for pay. That we, collectively, will it so (with laws) is precisely to encourage more art to be both created and shared. The enhanced level of creation is the entire point. Copyright lets you put an idea in someone's head and then prevent them from doing much with it. That is also an imposition, and a pretty damn extreme one, at that.
(This is not an argument in favor of extending the lifetime of copyright, which IMO is way too long. But the duration should be constant from the time of publication.)
Separately, society ought to not force artists to starve or sacrifice or be spouse-supported simply to be artists.
I think this could end poorly.
But laws, regulations, and agencies like the FDA keep them mostly in check. Yes, there have been some abuses and regulatory capture, but compare the state of US food and medicine before the creation of the FDA and after.
The chances of corporations starting to murder authors to profit off public domain assets is unlikely, especially as everyone will be able to use those assets when they become public domain.
It's exclusivity and artificial scarcity that earns these companies the most money (or corporations like Disney wouldn't have fought tooth and nail to extend copyright protections).
I think it should, since after they're dead it's no longer their correspondence, since they no longer exist.
Dead people have neither property rights, nor privacy rights nor any other kinds of interests that should be protected by law.
Also, a living person could just assign rights to another entity/person to carry them on after death. So it’s not that simple.
When he was writing the grapes of wraith, he was reading Sanora Babb's manuscript from his publisher friends. He was already an established writer, and managed to publish his own work heavily borrowed the structure and major plot from Sanora's work.
And obviously, no publishers are willing to publish Snora's work, because Mr. Steinbeck is telling them he is writing one that is very similar (which is obvious, because he is essentially copy the book's story line). Ms. Babb's work is only published in 2004, 70 years later after its original completion in 1930s.
I think Mr. Steinbeck probably deserve being stripped of his Nobel prize for this blatant misconduct.
Is there clear plagiarism? The Great Depression wasn't exactly an obscure topic and was still fresh in the minds of many people at the time.
What is going on? Is this posthumous cancel culture?
Wasn't it prudent to look for similar media and clear the wake? Publishing was a smaller, more difficult world back then and publishers wouldn't back two of the same thing.
Wouldn't you drum up support for the novel you worked on? Especially after having struggled for years as a manual laborer trying to make it? Would you willingly table your book that you worked on so that someone else could take your place?
Is that malice?
Unless there's clear evidence, it's like saying Marvel plagiarizes DC. And that Disney should be cancelled for scheduling their movie premieres around the best moviegoing dates. (Is that highly competitive? Sure. Evil? no...?)
Regardless, I think it’s odd you find something utterly unbelievable simply because you haven’t heard it until today. Surely the entire internet is full of true things that you, and I, and most people have never heard of? Not having heard a piece of information before doesn’t make it any less credible.
> She was the subject of intense FBI scrutiny for her “leftist” writing and blacklisted by the “House Un-American Committee” so she fled to Mexico. She also dared to marry an Asian man as a white woman which was not just frowned upon at the time but illegal.
That's awful. :(
""" Howe met his wife, a white woman named Sanora Babb, before World War II. They traveled to Paris in 1937 to marry, but their marriage was not recognized by the state of California until 1948, after the law banning interracial marriage was abolished.[5][13] Due to the ban, the "morals clause" in Howe's studio contracts prohibited him from publicly acknowledging his marriage to Babb. They would not cohabit due to his traditional Chinese views, so they had separate apartments in the same building.[14]
During the early years of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, Babb was blacklisted due to supposedly having Communist ties from her marriage to Howe; she moved to Mexico City to protect the "graylisted" Howe from racial harassment.[5][15]
Howe raised his godson, producer and director Martin Fong after Fong arrived in the United States. """
I'm sorry for my tone. I had no idea.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/forgotten-dust-b...
There's some information in the William Souder Biography of Steinbeck that came out last year. Though it wasn't presented as a clear-cut case of plagiarism there were definitely questions. He'd apparently had access to her manuscript for "Whose Names are Unknown" and he and Babb were traveling the migrant worker camps in Central California working on stories for various publications. They did appear to cross paths. I've yet to read "Whose Names are Unknown" to see how similar it might or might not be to "Grapes of Wrath".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grapes_of_Wrath#Similariti...
People can read the summaries of both if they like; there doesn't seem to be a lot of overlap other than they're both about downtrodden Okies trying to make it out West.
Edit: Also worth noting that Steinbeck's nonfiction account of migrant workers in California, The Harvest Gypsies, was published two years before Babb began her volunteer work with the migrant farmers.