Among the many important provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976 was the creation of “recapture” rights, designed to enable artists and their families to reclaim copyrights on works that they had licensed out before their later value became clear. An admirable goal, but the devil is in the details. Artists with complicated lives often leave squabbling heirs. Case in point: the great American writer John Steinbeck, author of such literary classics as Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939), who had three wives, and two sons by his second wife. In January the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit heard an appeal in the decades-long legal battle that his now deceased third wife, Elaine Steinbeck, and her estate, have had with the author’s two sons and publisher Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
As with so many inheritance squabbles, the story begins with a death: Steinbeck’s in 1968. In his will he left $50,000 to each of his sons, Thomas Steinbeck and John Steinbeck IV (who died in 1991), and 100 percent of rights to future earnings from his work to his then wife, Elaine.
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