STEINBECK’S AMERICAN IDOL

John Steinbeck may be best known for creating Tom Joad, but the author also provided the rough outline of Simon Cowell, a decade before the “American Idol” host was even born.

Newly revealed letters by one of America’s best known 20th century authors show that he was not only a prize-winning chronicler of his own times, but also a pop-culture genius, if more than a half-century before his time.

Mr. Steinbeck understood the power and growing popularity of television and formed a production company, World Video, with famed photographer Robert Capa and producer Henry S. White.

In a letter written in either 1948 or ’49, Mr. Steinbeck shared with Mr. White an idea for a new television show.

“What would you think of a lousy little stage, hook and all, and a ratchet club audience of real or simulated illiterates making the choice and the comments? And have real amateurs, some of them very bad. With a tough emcee, it could be wonderful – a mug’s amateur night. And instead of promising the contestants the world on a platter, make the trick just staying onstage at all. It could be very sad and very funny,” he wrote.

Catherine Williamson, director of the fine books and manuscripts department for Bonhams, the New York auction house that sold the letters this week, said she didn’t believe Mr. Steinbeck was being serious in his pitch.

“I think he’s just being cynical, but you’ll be kind of shocked and astonished how familiar these show ideas are,” she told public radio before reading from the letter to Mr. White.

Cynical or not, Mr. Steinbeck’s general idea: The tough emcee – Mr. Cowell – and the trick of staying on stage are the trademarks of “American Idol” where contestants sing to win the approval of the public and a panel of judges (real or simulated illiterates?) and are eliminated from the stage one by one.

Mr. Steinbeck predicted in a July 1948 Time magazine article that television “will take the place of most of the other arts because it combines all of them.”

“I shudder to think what it will do to housework,” he said.

He’d also likely shudder to think that his mug’s amateur night was one of the most popular shows on television 60 years after he suggested it.