Photographer Who Inspired Steinbeck’s ‘Grapes Of Wrath’ Dies

Horace Bristol, a photojournalist whose work graced the covers of Life magazine and helped inspire John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” has died. He was 88.

Bristol died Monday after a bout with colon cancer, his family said.

Bristol’s photographs appeared on the cover of Life at least five times, but he may be best known for a story that never made it to the magazine’s front page.

In 1938, he suggested to Steinbeck that they photograph and interview families living in migrant camps of California’s Central Valley. Their work became fodder for the author’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

Bristol’s pictures appeared in Life after the novel’s publication and were used to help cast the 1940 film that starred Henry Fonda.

“Horace Bristol was one of the most important photographers of his generation,” famed Life photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt once said. “His photographs must be seen and remembered.”

In a photography career that spanned the early 1930s to the mid 1950s, his images captured scenes of everyday beauty and uncommon events.

During World War II, Bristol joined Edward Steichen’s renowned U.S. Naval Photographic Unit. One of his pictures, “PBY Gunner,” showed a naked aviator who leaped from a seaplane to rescue a blinded Marine from the Pacific Ocean, then returned to his post in a gun turret.

His career largely ended in 1956 when his wife committed suicide. He destroyed much of his collection of negatives and prints and gave up photography for a life as a “frustrated architect.”

Bristol re-emerged in the mid-1980s after his son innocently asked if he had ever read “The Grapes of Wrath.”

“He realized he had completely neglected to share that part of his life with his children when in fact he had … interviewed migrant workers with Steinbeck,” Henri Bristol said Tuesday. “His perspective was telling stories with images, and I think he got a kick that people regarded it as art at all.”

In the late 1980s, he was astonished to discover his pictures brought about $1,500 apiece at an auction. His work became the subject of retrospectives in galleries.

In addition to his son Henri, he is survived by his second wife, Masako, another son, Horace, and a daughter, Akiko.