Stan Steiner (1925-1987)

Stan Steiner Is Dead at 62; Author, Consultant, Teacher

Stan Steiner, a writer whose works dealt largely with American minority groups, particularly Indians and Mexican-Americans, died of a heart attack Monday at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 62 years old.

Mr. Steiner's books included ''The New Indians'' (1968), ''La Raza. The Mexican Americans'' (1970), ''The Vanishing White Man'' (1976) and ''The Ranchers: A Book of Generations'' (1980). He also wrote and was a consultant for television films.

He taught subjects dealing with Western history and culture in the honors program at the University of New Mexico and at the University of Paris. He also lectured extensively at American universities.

He was born in Coney Island and attended the University of Wisconsin.

He is survived by his wife, the former Dr. Vera Polgar John; three children: Paul Steiner of Santa Fe, Suki John-Steiner of Manhattan, and Sandor John of Oakland, Calif.; a granddaughter, and two brothers, William, of Manhattan, and Clyde, of San Francisco.
(Web Source: The New York Times online archives, January 15, 1987)

Remembering Stan Steiner

Stan Steiner echoed writers across the country who felt that the publishing industry was in a sad state of affairs during the 1980s, because editors and publishers had lost touch with the America people--"especially with people in the West. So it behooves writers to publicize their books and market them on their own."

To combat what he termed eastern indifference, Steiner and some twenty-five of his fellow New Mexico authors formed the Writers Cooperative of Santa Fe during the early eighties to sell their work any way they could. "Going out and doing it yourself is what it's all about," he said. "Stop complaining about what the publishers do or don't do--just do it yourself."

Santa Fe writers took their books directly to the public, readers in small villages as well as New Mexico's largest cities. They even built their own booths at the state fair in Albuquerque, where they hawked their wares like everyone else. The concept is not really new, the co-op's first president, said. "But fairs are a great untapped marketplace."

Encouragement and financial backing from both the Santa Fe Arts Council and New Mexico Humanities Council kept the co-op alive, and their projects received favorable responses from state officials and readers at large. With substantial grants the writers organized and carried out a number of projects, such as renting a book van to travel as far as remote mining villages in the northern mountains. The Small Town Book Van Project gave most rural residents their first glimpse of a professional writer.

During the process of selling their books, the Santa Fe Co-op members came to the attention of eastern publishers when they were written up in The New York Times. Steiner credited a New York writers' conference with making himself and fellow mavericks angry enough to establish the cooperative.

"The invitation said 'Norman Mailer and Gloria Steinem and a bunch of people invite you to this conference.' So I wrote back saying, "I think this is a good idea; writers ought to fight for their rights, especially in this sad state of publishing.' But I noticed that they had no Western writers listed--and Mailer and Steinem don't represent the writers of the West. Well, they got real excited and said I had to come to New York to represent Western writers, which was their first mistake. No one represents a Western writer, other than him or herself."

Steiner's reply to the request was that New York culture is very provincial, that the nation had shifted west, along with demagogic charts, population, economy and politics. "The population center is no longer in Manhattan, New York. It's in Manhattan, Kansas, and you have to go beyond the Hudson. So I went to New York, and they had this panel they had arranged for me. Outside the door the panel read: 'Beyond the Hudson, outside the center of gravity.'"

Steiner and a group of Santa Fe writers returned from the conference and mulled that one over for some time. "What do we do about it?" they asked themselves. After a while, they stopped talking, stopped complaining, and formed the Writers Co-op of Santa Fe. "It's not a writers' literary club," Seiner was quick to explain. "Nor is it a literary support group, or group therapy. It's a group of professional writers who are trying to develop ways of marketing and selling books that are particularly, uniquely, and ingeniously Western."

Steiner, himself, was not indigenously Western, but embraced the West with both arms, refusing to let go. He was born in Spottswood, New Jersey, and grew up in the Flatbush area of Brooklyn, with westward yearnings.

"My father came to America in 1905 from Vienna, Austria, and the first postcard he sent home was a picture of Custer's scalp, on which my father had painted a feather."
(Web Source: Blog - Writers of the West by Jean Henry Mead, Blog Hostess)