Born February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California, not far from the setting of his novel Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck was the grandson of a German immigrant on his father’s side (whose name was originally Grossteinbeck), and of an Irish immigrant on his mother’s side. Both his father and his grandfather had been independent businessmen who owned and operated their own flour mill. His father also served as county treasurer for 11 years before retiring. Steinbeck’s mother was the daughter of a California rancher. She was a schoolteacher.
As educated people of some affluence, Steinbeck’s parents offered their children a variety of cultural experiences. The family regularly attended plays and concerts. Listening to their parents read was a customary after-dinner ritual for the Steinbeck children. Books were often prized holiday gifts.
From boyhood, John Steinbeck dreamed of being a writer. This youthful aspiration was not simply a dream, though. It was the goal that shaped his life. Even as a boy he spent part of each day writing. While the rest of the neighborhood slept, he sat in his room working for hours on short stories, which he submitted only anonymously. His early material was often rejected, but he remained undaunted.
After making “B’s” through high school, Steinbeck entered Stanford University. He attended college there for five years, but he never completed requirements for graduation. Constantly working on his fiction, Steinbeck took several college writing courses and published a few pieces in Stanford’s literary journals, but when he submitted his creative works to magazines, he still received only rejections.
He left Stanford at the age of 23 and moved to New York, hoping to become a writer. He got a job as a reporter but was ultimately dismissed since he was, admittedly, not very good at it. Somewhat discouraged, Steinbeck returned to California where he took on various odd jobs, all the while continuing to work on his fiction.
Following Steinbeck’s 1930 marriage to Carol Henning, he experienced his most successful decade. During their marriage, which lasted for a little over 10 years, Steinbeck came into his own as a writer and produced some of his best fiction. One reason was that early in the marriage, Carol allowed him to focus exclusively on his art. While he remained home writing, she worked to support them both.
Although he was writing diligently, Steinbeck won neither financial success nor critical acclaim with his early novels: Cup of Gold (1929), The Pastures of Heaven (1932), and To a God Unknown (1933). But all of this changed with the publication of Tortilla Flat (1935), which brought him immediate fame and wealth. This was to be the first of his best-sellers. The following year In Dubious Battle (1936) was published. Success, financial and critical, followed with the publication of Of Mice and Men (1937). The novel was produced on Broadway later that same year, and it won the Drama Critics’ Circle Award. The Grapes of Wrath (1939) won Steinbeck the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and a place in the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
But Steinbeck did not confine himself to the arena of fiction. Already practiced in publishing articles for newspapers, he wrote his first non-fiction book—Sea of Cortez(1941)—with his longtime friend Ed Ricketts. The book is based on the time Steinbeck spent with Ricketts on the Gulf of California collecting marine specimens.
With the beginning of a new decade came several endings for Steinbeck. In the late 1930s came the deterioration of Steinbeck’s marriage to Carol. In 1942, Carol divorced him. The next year he married Gwyndolen Conger Verdon and moved to New York. While this five-year marriage did give him his only two children, Tom and John, it marks the point at which the quality of his fiction began its decline.
Following his second marriage, and the move from his native California, Steinbeck published nearly a dozen novels. Though each of these show merit, on the whole, none match the excellence of his works of the 1930s. He continued, however, to follow the “drive” he had identified in a letter to his publisher: “making people understand each other.”
The Moon Is Down (1942), like Of Mice and Men, was written as a novel-play. As with Of Mice and Men, it was intended to illuminate a facet of the world Steinbeck’s audience did not understand. The novel focused on World War II and the Nazi occupation of Scandinavia.
As his personal contribution to the war cause, Steinbeck wrote Bombs Away (1942) for the Army Air Corps. Steinbeck’s wartime efforts were highly successful. The book was successful in helping to recruit soldiers, and royalties from the movie were contributed to the Air Corps. Later, for six months in 1943, Steinbeck took a more active role in the war, and served as the New York Herald Tribune war correspondent in the European war zone.
Cannery Row (1945) depicts a group of men who, instead of being displaced by society, have deliberately detached themselves from the social system. It is set in the pre-war 1930s and reflects his continued concern with social deviants.
The Pearl (1947) appeared first as a motion picture script. Steinbeck though, was reportedly not eager to continue in this medium. The Pearl was subsequently revised into a long magazine story and then a book. Steinbeck has called this his “folk tale” and likens it to a parable. The plot of this short novel is loosely based on a true story Steinbeck heard while he was in Mexico working on his Sea of Cortez. An account published in Sea of Cortez describes a young Indian’s discovery of “the Pearl of the World.” Ironically his good fortune, an assurance of physical and religious security, only brings him misery, and the story ends with the young Indian throwing the cursed pearl back into the sea.
Two of Steinbeck’s final novels—East of Eden (1952) and The Winter of Our Discontent (1961)—mark a return to the past. East of Eden returns to his familiar California setting as he portrays the fictional account of his mother’s family. The Winter of Our Discontent focuses on the superiority of things of the past.
During the 1950s, Steinbeck continued to express his social and political views, but in a new way. He helped write speeches for the 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns. He even served as advisor to President Johnson. For his advisory services during the years of the Vietnam conflict, Steinbeck was awarded the United States Medal of Freedom in 1964.
Continuing to experiment with narrative forms, Steinbeck published several non-fiction forms late in his career. A Russian Journal (1948) is an account of his travels in Russia. Travels with Charley (1962) records his thoughts while traveling the country with his dog, Charley. He also published The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951) which included a biographical sketch of Ricketts, his valued friend who had died a few years earlier. Once There Was a War (1958) was his publication of wartime dispatches.
Though Steinbeck never again recaptured the glory of the 1930s, his stature as one of America’s foremost novelists remained. In 1948 he was elected to the American Academy of Letters. In 1962 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. He had won his place in American literary history.
He had also found happiness in marriage. Steinbeck married Elaine Scott in 1950. They were together, happily according to Steinbeck, until his death in late 1968.
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John Steinbeck biography
John Ernst Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California. He was the third of four children, and the only son born to John Ernst Sr. and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck. A fourth child, Mary, was born in 1909. Olive Steinbeck had been a teacher in one-room schools in Big Sur, California, before her marriage to John Sr. After their marriage, the Steinbecks moved to Salinas in 1894, where John Sr. became a manager at the Sperry Flour Mill and later served as treasurer of Monterey County.
Salinas is located one hundred miles south of San Francisco, near Monterey Bay. At the time of Steinbeck’s birth, it was a town with a population of approximately three thousand. During John’s early childhood, the first automobiles could be seen rumbling through town. Family life was apparently secure and happy. Steinbeck’s father quickly recognized his son’s talents and eventually both parents encouraged Steinbeck in his dream to become a writer.
Steinbeck’s best-known works of fiction, including The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men (1937), are set in central California, where he grew up. In particular, one of the principal locales in The Grapes of Wrath is the San Joaquin Valley, a fertile farming area which lies east of the Gabilan Mountains. Although Steinbeck’s family was solidly middle class, he had to earn his own money during high school. He worked on nearby ranches during the summer and he also delivered newspapers on his bike, exploring Salinas’s Mexican neighborhood and Chinatown. Later, he would use his boyhood memories of these places in his stories and novels.
As a child, Steinbeck was shy and often a loner. Other children teased him about his large ears, and he responded by withdrawing into books. He was an excellent storyteller, a lifelong trait that found its natural outlet in his writing. In 1915, Steinbeck entered Salinas High School and began writing stories and sending them anonymously to magazines. He was president of his senior class and graduated in a class of twenty-four students. Steinbeck enrolled in Stanford University in 1919, which he would attend on and off for the next six years. He left Stanford in 1925 without a degree.
During the summers and other times he was away from college, Steinbeck worked as a farm laborer, sometimes living with migrants in the farm’s bunkhouse. After leaving school for good in 1925, Steinbeck took a job on a freighter and went to New York City. There he worked in construction and later as a reporter for The American for twenty-five dollars a week. But he was fired because his reporting was not “objective” enough. When he failed to find a publisher for his short stories, he returned to California by freighter. In 1930, Steinbeck married Carol Henning and settled in Pacific Grove. While Carol worked at various jobs to support John’s career, he continued to write. Finally, in 1935 his first successful novel, Tortilla Flat, was published. In 1937, Of Mice and Men became an immediate best-seller, and Steinbeck became a respected writer. He adapted this novel into a play, which won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1937.
The stress that came with success and fame hastened the collapse of Steinbeck’s marriage, which ended in 1942. A year later, Steinbeck married dancer-singer Gwen Conger, with whom he had two sons—his only children—before their divorce in 1948. By 1950, Steinbeck had married his third wife, Elaine Scott.
After leaving California in the early 1940s, Steinbeck lived the rest of his life in New York City and on Long Island in New York. His final novel, published the year before he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, was The Winter of Our Discontent. The story focuses on the decline of the moral climate in America. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1962, only five other Americans had received the award: Sinclair Lewis Eugene O’Neill, Pearl Buck William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway.
Accepting the Nobel Prize in Sweden, Steinbeck said: “The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement. Furthermore, the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat—for courage, compassion, and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally-flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man, has no dedication nor any membership in literature.”
Steinbeck wrote no fiction after receiving the Nobel Prize. His reporting on the Vietnam War for Newsday, a Long Island newspaper, in 1967 caused many people to label him a hawk and a warmonger. Steinbeck died following a heart attack on December 20, 1968. He was sixty-six years old. His ashes were buried in Salinas, California.
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JOHN ERNST STEINBECK (1902–1968)
What makes John Steinbeck so fascinating? His quirky personality? His unique world view? His powerful understanding of the American spirit? The broad range of his work in fiction, nonfiction, drama and film? Discover the man behind the book Oprah says might be the best novel she's ever read!
A shy man. A class act. A visionary. An experimental writer. A socially engaged citizen. A "shameless magpie," as he described his habit of picking up on the sounds of people's speech, fragments of their stories. Although opinions vary on how to describe the man, John Steinbeck is one of America's most beloved and honored writers. Described as "the bard of the people" in a Centennial celebration of his birth that lasted a full year, he gave a voice to the downtrodden and dispossessed in America. His compassionate portraits of the human condition sell more than 700,000 copies every year, and many of his works are cherished by every generation that discovers them. As popular today as he was during his lifetime, nearly all of his works are still in print.
JOHN STEINBECK: An Affair in the Salinas Valley
During summers as a boy, Steinbeck worked as a hired hand on local ranches. Born February 27, 1902 in Salinas California, he took in the sights, sounds and smells of the valley he called home and they made their mark on him. His first stories were written as a teenager in the house where he was born. Thus began John Steinbeck's love affair with the valley of his birth: an affair that would take him from a struggling writer to a Pulitzer Prize-winning author celebrated around the world. Steinbeck spent his youth soaking up the rich agricultural valley that would become the setting of many of his novels and stories.
But Steinbeck's relationship with the town of Salinas was a turbulent one. The farming community provides the background for several of his stories, including East of Eden, but Steinbeck's writing also alienated the writer from the very people he portrayed so honestly. Following the publication of The Grapes of Wrath in 1939, the people of Salinas valley railed against Steinbeck for what they considered to be a scathing image of their way of life. In writing East of Eden more than a decade later, Steinbeck set out to pay tribute to Salinas. His goal was to leave a record of the beauty of his homeland, and the truth of his heritage, for his sons—John IV and Thomas—and generations to come.
Making Ends Meet While Living a Dream
Steinbeck decided at the age of 14 that he wanted to be a writer. His mother, Olive, a former teacher, fostered his love of reading and writing, but eventually lamented his decision to make it a profession. Following graduation from Salinas High School in 1919, Steinbeck attended Stanford University sporadically until 1925, enrolling in creative writing classes but ultimately dropped out without a degree. For the next four years, he concentrated on writing, living first in New York City and eventually returning to California. In the beginning, he had a hard time making a go of it. He struggled to find a publisher, and even after the publication of his first three novels (starting with Cup of Gold in 1929), he was still virtually unknown.
Until he became a successful writer (with his first monetary and critical success, Tortilla Flat, published in 1935) he earned a living as a carpenter, ranch hand, factory laborer, sales clerk, caretaker and reporter, and was also given financial assistance by his father in the hope that he would develop his craft. He did. Unfortunately, just before his fame broke, Steinbeck suffered the loss of both parents.
From Best-sellers to Blockbusters
Steinbeck's most famous novel, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), is a landmark of twentieth-century American literature; it tells the story of Oklahoma migrant workers and California growers in the darkest days of the California depression. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and catapulted Steinbeck into his generation's literary elite. His thirty-four works of fiction and non-fiction (most written during a very prolific period from 1935–1965) are varied in subject and convey his enthusiasm and curiosity about the world. They are honest. They are real.
Other notable works include Tortilla Flat, Of Mice and Men, Sea of Cortez, Cannery Row, The Pearl and East of Eden. He considered the last his epic—the novel he was born to write. After it was finished, he wrote the majority of his non-fiction, penning the travelogue Travels with Charley , an adaptation of the classic Arthurian legend Morte d'Arthur and a book of essays titled America and Americans.
Steinbeck was also very prolific in film. Unlike many writers, he became deeply involved in several adaptations of his works, forging life-long friendship with such directors as Elia Kazan, writing a few scripts himself, and spending time helping to rewrite storylines. Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, Tortilla Flat, The Pearl, The Red Pony and East of Eden were all successfully adapted for the screen and brought him further fame and fortune.
The Myth, The Legend
John Steinbeck lived a life of active observation. He was intensely curious and also intensely private. Many of his closest relationships were strained by his unwavering commitment to his work. Steinbeck's friendship with marine biologist and philosopher Edward F. Ricketts ("Doc," as he is portrayed in a number of Steinbeck's works) was profoundly influential in shaping his views (together they wrote Sea of Cortez in 1941) and the loss of his friend to a train accident in 1948 left him bereft, without the intellectual companion whose friendship he'd long cherished.
Steinbeck married three times. His first wife Carol was very involved at the beginning of his career; she provided editorial advice, unwavering support and hours of commitment typing his hand-written notes into finished drafts. Gwyn Conger, his second wife, was the mother of his sons Thom and John. In 1949 he met his third wife, Elaine. Steinbeck and Elaine, who were very bonded, remained together for the rest of his life, spending most of their time in New York and Sag Harbor. His later years were spent writing and traveling extensively; he was recognized as one of America's most beloved writers. One of the pinnacles of his career was accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, where he paid tribute to the written word and his literary debt to contemporary William Faulkner. John Steinbeck died in New York City on December 20, 1968. Steinbeck's ashes are buried in his family plot in Salinas, California.
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