John Steinbeck IV
| John Steinbeck IV | |
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John Steinbeck at 19 (left) with father John (center) visiting President Johnson in the Oval Office, May 16, 1966.
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| Born | John Steinbeck Jr. June 12, 1946 New York City, United States |
| Died | February 7, 1991 (aged 44) Encinitas, California, United States |
| Occupation | Writer, War Correspondent |
| Notable works | In Touch; The Other Side of Eden: Life with John Steinbeck |
John Steinbeck IV (June 12, 1946 – February 7, 1991) was an American journalist and author. He was the second child of the Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck. In 1965, he was drafted into the United States Army and served in Vietnam. He worked as a journalist for Armed Forces Radio and TV, and as a war correspondent for the United States Department of Defense.
In 1968, Steinbeck returned to Vietnam as a journalist. Along with Sean Flynn (the son of actor Errol Flynn), he started Dispatch News Service, which originally published Seymour Hersh's story on the My Lai Massacre. Fluent in street Vietnamese, Flynn and Steinbeck quickly became independent of the flow of information dispensed by the United States Press Office, enabling them to discover the truth about the My Lai Massacre and the Con Son Island prison "tiger cages". Flynn disappeared after being taken as a prisoner of war during a photo shoot in Cambodia.
Steinbeck's Vietnam memoir In Touch was published by Knopf in 1969. He wrote about his experiences with the Vietnamese and GIs. Steinbeck took the vows of a Buddhist monk while living on Phoenix Island in the Mekong Delta, under the tutelage of the politically powerful Coconut Monk, a silent tree-dwelling Buddhist yogi who adopted Steinbeck as a spiritual son. Amid the raging war, Steinbeck stayed in the monk's "peace zone", where the 400 monks who lived on the island hammered howitzer shells into bells.
While in Saigon, Steinbeck participated in Michael Rubbo's 1970 documentary film Sad Song of Yellow Skin, as part of a group of young American journalists practicing a New Journalism approach to covering the war.
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