SAN FRANCISCO — For 50 years, the old box of documents collected dust in Twyla Martin's West Hollywood garage. She knew the cursive scribblings on stacks of crumbling, sepia-toned pages had something to do with Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck, but never looked.
In the 1950s, her husband, producer Ernest H. Martin, had briefly worked with Steinbeck, a longtime friend. Martin died in 1995, and after moving the box to a hallway closet, his widow finally peeked inside.
What she found, literary experts say, was a treasure trove of Steinbeck effects, including the missing first draft of the novel "Sweet Thursday," the lighthearted sequel to Steinbeck's "Cannery Row," along with other manuscripts, an unpublished short story and letters and postcards.
Known for his tales of Depression-era America, Steinbeck won the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes and is the author of such literary classics as "The Grapes of Wrath," "East of Eden" and "Of Mice and Men." He died in 1968.
On Thursday, the archive -- divided into two lots -- was offered at auction at a rare-book gallery here and was expected to fetch as much as $500,000.
But the presumed bidding war between collectors and institutions failed to materialize. Although a manuscript of the Steinbeck work "The Log From the Sea of Cortez" sold for $80,000, the rest went unclaimed.
"What can I say?" Martin said. "The auction house tells me there still may be some interest because institutions often don't have the time to get that kind of money together so quickly."
But one Steinbeck scholar said only a well-endowed institution could spend so much to purchase a manuscript of "Sweet Thursday," which she called one of Steinbeck's minor works.
"That's a lot of money," said Susan Shillinglaw, an English professor at San Jose State and visiting Steinbeck scholar in residence at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, Calif. "Most libraries don't have that much. Places like Harvard and Stanford might want to add to their collections, but others would have to have a donor who saw the worth of the documents."
Whatever the discovery's monetary value, Steinbeck experts said it has literary significance.
"It's a gem," said Mimi Gladstein, president of the National John Steinbeck Society of America, who teaches courses on the author at the University of Texas at El Paso.
