SALINAS, Calif. - Perhaps John Steinbeck said it best when he said, "No town celebrates a writer before he's dead."
Steinbeck knew this scrabbly little hometown of his didn't much like him. Matter of fact, folks here hated him.
Hated his ugly stories. Hated his pitiful characters. He wrote of whores and tramps and drunks, and of those wrung-out crop pickers, those miserable migrants. Honored them, he did. Exalted them. And spat on the growers and shippers who built Salinas into something.
The Salinas elite got back at him for his betrayal. They burned "The Grapes of Wrath" on Main Street.
But that was 58 years ago. Now that same Main Street is preparing to host a $9 million National Steinbeck Center, due to open in the summer of 1998.
It's controversial, yes. But the controversy is not about whether to honor Steinbeck. It's about whether the planned museum does him justice.
With the April 26 groundbreaking ceremony just a few weeks off, Salinas has stumbled into a jealous - and unexpected - debate over how best to pay tribute to its most famous native son, the poet of the paisano who won every major award in literature, including the Pulitzer and the Nobel prizes.
The town that once reviled Steinbeck now argues over what style architecture would best reflect his values, over how to craft exhibits that will best convey his truths.
Is an imposing modern building the proper forum to honor a man who recoiled from the "yellow smoke of progress," a man who spoke for the poor and dispossessed? Can a museum built around stage sets and film clips adequately convey the crusading fire that burns through Steinbeck's prose?
Patricia Leach, executive director of the National Steinbeck Center, says she welcomes the questions. "Art is controversial," she said. "I think these are healthy issues to explore."
It took a decade for Salinas to work its way up to next month's groundbreaking.
And now, in the town that once despised Steinbeck, critics assert that the new museum does not look like John Steinbeck.
The building's boosters readily concede that the new center will not look anything like the migrant shacks Steinbeck wrote about in "The Grapes of Wrath" or the stinking sardine factories he described in "Cannery Row." Instead, they hope the building will be true to the overall spirit of Steinbeck's work.
"To us, John Steinbeck's work is all about strength of character, something we're trying to embody in the building," explained design architect Kurt Schultz, of the Portland, Ore., company Thompson and Vaivoda.
The center will become the new repository for the 30,000 tapes, letters, photos, manuscripts and other archives now in storage at Salinas' public library. A room dubbed "The Art of Writing" will let visitors thumb through copies of Steinbeck's works in several languages. There will be a biographical film on Steinbeck, too, and a timeline of his life.