Nancy Steinbeck

Who is Nancy Steinbeck?

Nancy Lenn Steinbeck is the co-author of the dual memoir The Other Side of Eden which includes the posthumous autobiography of John Steinbeck IV, son of the beloved American author. The Writer magazine named the it among the top ten books for 2001.

She was a musical child prodigy, but decided to pursue careers in writing and social work. After attending the prestigious Lowell High School in San Francisco, she graduated from the University of California, Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement. She shares a unique history with a small group of San Francisco teenagers as being one of the original Haight-Ashbury hippies.

Nancy spent a decade traveling around the world and living abroad, in Kathmandu, on a commune in British Columbia, and in a tiny mountain village in Mexico. She has worked as a therapist with hard core delinquents at the San Francisco Juvenile Hall and drug addicts at Scripps McDonald Center in La Jolla, California. She and John met in Boulder, Colorado, in 1975, where they studied Tibetan Buddhism at Naropa University with Chögyam Trungpa, the notorious renegade Tibetan lama.

Upon John's untimely death in 1991, due to complications from back surgery, Nancy moved to a remote area of the Ozark Mountains, where she became an advocate for severely mentally ill adults. She now collaborates with Oxford scholar and mystic, Andrew Harvey, as his editor and CEO of his Institute For Sacred Activism.