Since its inception in 1977, the John Steinbeck Project has raised over $270,000 for Southampton Graduate Campus of Long Island University. Funds have been used to establish a Visiting Writers Program, the annual Steinbeck Lecture, student writing awards and scholarships, and acquisitions for the College Library.

In addition to these programs, one of the original goals of the Project was to create a Writers Resource Room in the library in honor of John Steinbeck, the Nobel Prize-winning author who spent the last years of his life on the East End of Long Island. Only one year after the project was initiated, the John Steinbeck Writers Room was opened. To date, approximately approximately 60 distinguished writers have used it.

Each year, the Project sponsors the Meet the Writers Book Fair. Kicking off the Hamptons social season, authors of the years' most exciting books gather to autograph their works and meet the public. Funds raised through the Book Fairs have helped maintain the John Steinbeck Writers Room, supported John Steinbeck Lectures by six eminent writers: E.L. Doctorow, Wilfrid Sheed, Gloria Emerson, Richard Reeves, Peter Matthiessen, and Philip Appleman, and enabled Writers- in-Residence: Jane Howard, Judith Rossner, Linda Bird Francke, Bruce Friedman, Joe Pintauro, Kenneth Koch, Susan Isaacs, Emily Prager, Diana Chang and Shana Alexander to work with students of the College's Writing and Literature programs in seminars, classes, and informal discussions.

Approximately 25% of the Book Fair funds have supported awards and scholarships to Southampton Graduate Campus students in the Writing Program in both poetry and prose, judged by such writers as Berton Roueche, Wilfrid Sheed, the late Alden Whitman, Robert Long, Betty Prashker, Galen Williams and Joan Whitman; the acquisition of reference books and other research materials in literature for the library; and support for the library's access to the OCLC computerized library system, a data base that includes over 33 million bibliographic records from 21,000 libraries.

The 2005 Book Fair will raise funds to support scholarships for Southampton Graduate Campus' graduate writing programs. Although the College's undergraduate programs are being transferred to Long Island University (LIU) sister college CW Post, all graduate programs will remain at the Southampton campus along with the School of Continuing Studies, LIU's public radio station, WLIU, and the award winning Children's School.