John Steinbeck Asking Marilyn Monroe for Her Autograph (1955)

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Marilyn Monroe and John Steinbeck portraits with overlay of a typed letter. Text reads: When John Steinbeck Asked Marilyn Monroe for an Autograph.

John Steinbeck couldn’t stand autograph hunters. According to Keith Ferrell’s biography John Steinbeck: The Voice of the Land, the Nobel laureate had little patience for pushy young writers seeking a leg up, for people who’d never opened one of his books but enjoyed the novelty of meeting an author, and especially for the relentless stream of fans who cornered famous people for their signatures. He found the whole business faintly nauseating.

Which makes what he did on April 28, 1955, all the more entertaining.

On that date, Steinbeck sat down and wrote a letter to Marilyn Monroe, asking her for a personalised, autographed photograph. Monroe was by then the most photographed woman on earth, a far cry from the days when she was an unknown pin-up model earning ten dollars an hour. He typed the letter up via his secretary, addressed it to Monroe’s suite at the Waldorf Towers in New York City, signed it, and sent it off. The man who found autograph seekers tiresome had become one.

Typed letter dated April 28, 1955, from John Steinbeck to Marilyn Monroe. The letter humorously requests an autographed photo.

How Uncle John Got Himself Into This

The trouble started with a loose-lipped wife.

Mrs. Elaine Steinbeck, while visiting her sister's family in Austin, Texas, let slip to her teenage nephew that Uncle John had actually met Marilyn Monroe. The boy's name was Jon Atkinson, he was seventeen years old, a student at Stephen F. Austin High School, and Monroe was his absolute obsession. The revelation that his uncle had personally encountered the star of The Seven Year Itch and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes transformed Steinbeck's stock in the young man's eyes overnight.

As Steinbeck confided to Monroe in the letter itself: "On a recent trip to Texas, my wife made a fatal error of telling my nephew that I have met you. He doesn't really believe it, but his respect for me has gone way up."

The logical follow-up, from a lovestruck seventeen-year-old's perspective, was obvious. Could Uncle John get him an autographed photo? And not just any photo. Something special. Something in what Steinbeck described as a "pensive, girlish mood."

Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell in a promotional photo for the movie The Seven Year Itch, 1955

The Letter Itself: A Masterclass in Favour-Asking

Steinbeck, being Steinbeck, couldn't simply dash off a routine request. The letter is a miniature comic gem, self-aware and perfectly calibrated, written by someone who understood exactly how ridiculous the situation was and leaned into it fully.

He opens by acknowledging the absurdity head-on. In his experience, he writes, nobody ever admits to wanting an autograph for themselves. It's always for a child or an elderly aunt, which, as he notes, gets very tiresome. "It is therefore, with a certain nausea," he continues, "that I tell you that I have a nephew-in-law who lives in Austin, Texas."

He describes Jon as having "his foot in the door of puberty," which is both accurate for a seventeen-year-old and spectacularly embarrassing for the boy in question. He reassures Monroe that she needn't worry about shattering any illusions. "I know that you are not made of celestial ether, but he doesn't. A suggestion that you have normal functions would shock him deeply and I'm not going to be the one to tell him."

The request itself is delivered with a straight face: "Would you send him, in my care, a picture of yourself, perhaps in pensive, girlish mood, inscribed to him by name and indicating that you are aware of his existence. He is already your slave. This would make him mine."

And the offered payment? Steinbeck promises to send Monroe "a guest key to the ladies' entrance of Fort Knox" in return.

The tone throughout is that of one public figure speaking to another as an equal. It's charm as a competitive sport, with Steinbeck quietly signalling that he's someone worth doing a favour for, while maintaining the fiction that this is purely a selfless act on behalf of a smitten teenager.

Steinbeck and Monroe: More Connected Than You'd Think

The letter wasn't written between total strangers. By 1955, Steinbeck and Monroe had crossed paths in ways that gave the correspondence a natural, collegial warmth.

In 1952, Monroe had appeared in O. Henry's Full House, an anthology film in which Steinbeck served as on-screen narrator. It was Steinbeck's only on-camera film appearance, and Monroe's contribution was a brief cameo in the segment "The Cop and the Anthem," playing a streetwalker opposite Charles Laughton. They were on the same production, even if not in the same scenes.

Then, just a month before Steinbeck wrote his letter, Monroe had served as a celebrity usherette at the New York premiere of East of Eden, Elia Kazan's film adaptation of Steinbeck's 1952 novel, starring James Dean. The premiere was a benefit for the Actors Studio, and Monroe's presence caused such a sensation that police horses had to be stationed on both sides of the hotel entrance to hold back the crowd. There were fans with cameras and autograph books snaking around Park Avenue.

Monroe also owned several of Steinbeck's books and is believed to have met him personally at least once, possibly through her third husband, playwright Arthur Miller, who moved in overlapping literary circles.

So when Steinbeck wrote to Monroe, he wasn't writing blind. He was writing to someone whose path had crossed his more than once, and the letter's easy, peer-to-peer tone reflects that.

The Mystery: Did Monroe Ever Reply?

Here's where things get genuinely interesting, and where the story moves from charming anecdote into something slightly more puzzling.

Monroe clearly valued the letter enough to keep it. When she died in August 1962, she left the bulk of her estate, including her extensive personal archive of letters and correspondence, to her acting teacher Lee Strasberg. When Strasberg himself died in 1982, control of Monroe's estate passed to his wife, Anna Strasberg. It was Anna Strasberg who eventually put items from the archive up for sale at Julien's Auctions in November 2016.

The Steinbeck letter fetched $3,520 at that sale, which sounds respectable until you learn that a pair of Monroe's fishnet stockings from the same auction sold for $15,625, and a single sock attributed to her went for $1,920.

As for whether Jon Atkinson ever received his photograph, the evidence points in contradictory directions. One account suggests Monroe did comply and sent the autographed photo through to the teenager. But there's a complication: Jon Atkinson, who is still alive and, as of recent research, living in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, with his wife Joan, has never confirmed receiving it. Joan Atkinson, when contacted about the story, pointed out something curious about the letter itself: the signature on it isn't Steinbeck's usual handwriting. Steinbeck habitually wrote his personal letters in longhand pencil. This one was typed, and the initials "mf" appear below the signature, indicating it was dictated and typed by a secretary rather than written in Steinbeck's own hand.

That detail doesn't make the letter a forgery. It was verified as genuine by Snopes, and the content, the humour, the voice, and the specific personal details all fit Steinbeck precisely. But it does add a layer of ambiguity to the story. Was this a letter Steinbeck dashed off almost as a professional courtesy rather than a deeply personal plea? Did Monroe's people receive it, file it, and never quite get around to fulfilling the request?

The promised Fort Knox key, notably, has never surfaced either.

John F. Kennedy (with his back to the camera), U.S. Robert Kennedy (far left), and actress Marilyn Monroe, on the occasion of President Kennedy's 45th birthday celebrations at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

What the Auction Revealed About Monroe’s Inner Life

The 2016 Julien’s Auctions sale, which drew from both the estate of Lee Strasberg and the collection of dedicated Monroe collector David Gainsborough-Roberts, offered an unexpectedly intimate window into Monroe’s life beyond the camera.

Alongside the Steinbeck letter, the auction included annotated scripts showing Monroe’s working notes and preparations, an empty prescription bottle, a ballerina paperweight, stockings, gowns, pinup memorabilia, and a programme from John F. Kennedy’s birthday celebration at Madison Square Garden in May 1962, just months before Monroe’s death. That programme sold for $12,500 at the same sale and carries a weight of historical significance given what we now know about Monroe’s relationship with the Kennedy family. It was the same Kennedy whose life was already shadowed by at least one forgotten assassination attempt before Dallas.

The assortment of objects speaks to a woman who collected tokens and kept things that mattered to her, a habit that preserved Steinbeck’s letter for more than six decades after she received it.

The Letter as a Cultural Artefact

The Steinbeck-Monroe letter has taken on a life of its own since stories about it began circulating widely in 2019 and flared up again in 2021. It appeals precisely because it captures two enormous American figures at a human scale, one self-deprecating and witty, the other on the receiving end of a charm offensive she apparently found worth preserving.

It’s also a snapshot of a particular moment in 1955 New York, when Steinbeck was at the height of his post-Nobel reputation and Monroe was simultaneously the world’s most photographed woman and a serious student at the Actors Studio, trying to be taken seriously as an actress. Mid-decade New York was a city in flux, where figures like Christine Jorgensen were rewriting what celebrity and identity could mean, and where literary and Hollywood worlds collided constantly. The premiere of East of Eden, the Waldorf Towers address, the Actors Studio connection: all of it situates the letter in a very specific cultural ecosystem where literary New York and Hollywood celebrity overlapped in ways that seem almost unimaginable today.

Whether Jon Atkinson ever got his photo, the letter found its permanent audience. It sold for $3,520, survived the decades that Monroe, Strasberg, and Steinbeck himself didn’t, and now circulates endlessly on social media, still raising a smile.

Steinbeck knew what he was doing when he called the whole business nauseating. He just knew he was going to do it anyway.