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More From Across the College Green Her years were few, her mark indelible The best-laid birthday plans Graduates need to employ new career tactics Center is a win for humanities Sharing a true gift for music A case of cultural preservation Students concerned with safety on the job New insights for cancer patients, families The right place, the right time Notes of interest Listen in... To listen to Brian Naylor's Feb. 25, 2002 report on NPR's "Morning Edition" featuring Robert DeMott, visit the NPR Web site. This link to NPR is used with permission of National Public Radio, Inc. Any unauthorized duplication is strictly prohibited. (A new browser window will open when you follow this link.)   Write to us! Care to comment on an Ohio Today story? Or share a memory about your days on campus? Then drop us a letter to the editor. Here's how: E-mail Send e-mail to ohiotoday@ohio.edu By regular mail Letters Ohio Today 102 Scott Quad Ohio University Athens, OH 45701-2979 Fax Fax letters to (740) 593-1887 Letters to the editor may be edited for space and style

This might well be the busiest birthday Professor Bob DeMott ever celebrated -- and it isn't even his own. Feb. 27, 2002, marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of American novelist John Steinbeck. And DeMott is in high demand all year thanks to his knowledge of the Nobel Prize winner.     Professor Bob DeMott is among those celebrating the 100th anniversary of novelist John Steinbeck's birth. Photo by Rick Fatica "Part of what I've done as an editor, critic and scholar on Steinbeck is to try to indicate ways he's a much better writer and more complex writer than he's ever given credit for," says DeMott, the University's Edwin and Ruth Kennedy Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Writing. "Steinbeck had a very, very prophetic conception of what we would call ecology -- issues not just of homelessness but also larger issues of what we are doing to the planet and what we need to do to be better," he says. "It was the kind of thing not necessarily picked up by the critics of the '30s, '40s or '50s." One treasure DeMott found in his research provided material for his book "Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath, 1938-1941," one in a trilogy of books he wrote on Steinbeck's creativity. "It was a journal he kept while he was writing arguably one of the most famous novels of the 20th century, and it had never been published," says DeMott, who found a typed version of the journal at the University of Texas' Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. He didn't see the original until years later when a curator discovered it in a sealed package Steinbeck had donated to New York's Pierpont Morgan Library. DeMott compiled the journal's contents and his own annotations in "Working Days," which was reviewed in nearly 70 newspapers and Time, Newsweek and The New Yorker when it appeared in 1989. The journal described an inner struggle pitting the seduction of his growing fame (by then he had published eight books, including "Of Mice and Men") and his need to focus on the novel. Topping DeMott's Steinbeck-related appearances this year: a spot on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" Feb. 25 and participation in John Steinbeck Day in New York Feb. 27, where at a Barnes & Noble store DeMott highlighted the third volume in the Library of America's Steinbeck project, which he edited. The project is part of an ongoing effort to publish in uniform editions the works of America's great writers. DeMott worked on the first two Steinbeck volumes with the author's widow, Elaine Steinbeck. In March, he organized a panel discussion at an international Steinbeck conference in New York. -- Joan Slattery Wall