John Steinbeck - Biographical John Steinbeck The Nobel Prize in Literature 1962 John Steinbeck Questions and Answers on John Steinbeck John Steinbeck (1902-1968), born in Salinas, California, came from a family of moderate means. He worked his way through college at Stanford University but never graduated. In 1925 he went to New York, where he tried for a few years to establish himself as a free-lance writer, but he failed and returned to California. After publishing some novels and short stories, Steinbeck first became widely known with Tortilla Flat (1935), a series of humorous stories about Monterey paisanos. Steinbeck's novels can all be classified as social novels dealing with the economic problems of rural labour, but there is also a streak of worship of the soil in his books, which does not always agree with his matter-of-fact sociological approach. After the rough and earthy humour of Tortilla Flat, he moved on to more serious fiction, often aggressive in its social criticism, to In Dubious Battle (1936), which deals with the strikes of the migratory fruit pickers on California plantations.

This was followed by Of Mice and Men (1937), the story of the imbecile giant Lennie, and a series of admirable short stories collected in the volume The Long Valley (1938). In 1939 he published what is considered his best work, The Grapes of Wrath, the story of Oklahoma tenant farmers who, unable to earn a living from the land, moved to California where they became migratory workers. Among his later works should be mentioned East of Eden (1952), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), and Travels with Charley (1962), a travelogue in which Steinbeck wrote about his impressions during a three-month tour in a truck that led him through forty American states. He died in New York City in 1968. From Nobel Lectures , Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969 This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel . It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures .

To cite this document, always state the source as shown above. Author Series: John Steinbeck | Channel One News Author Series: John Steinbeck By ch1c0nta@ctus 07.27.2010 interact > Books share: The Pulitzer Prize-winning author, John Steinbeck, wrote 27 books during his lifetime. Of those, 13 were novels, including the Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men and East of Eden. Steinbeck grew up in Salinas, California, a central California town where his father was also the Monterey County Treasurer and his mother a school teacher. Living in a small rural town and working on ranches with migrant workers figured prominently in his writing. Steinbeck studied at Salinas High School and attended Stanford University until 1925, but never received his degree. After failing his mission of “becoming a writer” when he moved to New York City and couldn’t get work as a freelancer, he moved back to California where he held many odd jobs as a tour guide and caretaker at the fish hatchery, and did factory work. He married three times and had the freedom to write and travel because he lived on his family’s land.

John Steinbeck 0 of 12 questions completed Questions: Find out how much you know about the authors novels and life. You have already completed the quiz before. Hence you can not start it again. Quiz is loading... You must sign in or sign up to start the quiz. You have to finish following quiz, to start this quiz: Results 0 of 12 questions answered correctly Time has elapsed You have reached 0 of 0 points, (0) Categories Where did John Steinbeck grow up? Buffalo, NY Where did Steinbeck go to college, but never graduate? University of Southern California Where did Steinbeck move to pursue his writing career? Chicago, IL New York, NY Correct 1 / 1 Points New York, NY. Steinbeck moved to New York to pursue writing, but eventually went back home to California where his writing career took off. Incorrect / 1 Points New York, NY. Steinbeck moved to New York to pursue writing, but eventually went back home to California where his writing career took off. Question 4 of 12 Which of the following novels was NOT one of the 27 books Steinbeck wrote?

The Old Man and the Sea Of Mice and Men The Old Man and the Sea. Earnest Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea. Incorrect / 1 Points The Old Man and the Sea. Earnest Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea. Question 5 of 12 What was the first novel published by John Steinbeck? Cup of Gold Which novel was considered his first critical success? Tortilla Flat Which novel won the Pulitzer Prize? The Grapes of Wrath In the Grapes of Wrath, the Joad family migrates from this state: Arkansas Oklahoma Correct 1 / 1 Points Oklahoma. During the Great Depression, a family of sharecroppers called the Joads must leave their home in Oklahoma due to drought and changes in the farming industry. Incorrect / 1 Points Oklahoma. During the Great Depression, a family of sharecroppers called the Joads must leave their home in Oklahoma due to drought and changes in the farming industry. Question 9 of 12 9. Question The area of land in Oklahoma where the drought and lack of crop rotation ruined farms, was dubbed the Dust Bowl. True or False? True False Correct 1 / 1 Points True.

The Dust Bowl was a term used to describe the prairie farm lands destroyed by drought, a lack of crop rotatio and severe dust storms during the Great Depression. Incorrect / 1 Points True. The Dust Bowl was a term used to describe the prairie farm lands destroyed by drought, a lack of crop rotatio and severe dust storms during the Great Depression. Question 10 of 12 10. Question The Joad family leaves Oklahoma and sets off West on Route 66. Where are they going? California Oregon Correct 1 / 1 Points California. The Joad family travels to California in hopes of working on the fertile citrus farms they believe cover the state. Incorrect / 1 Points California. The Joad family travels to California in hopes of working on the fertile citrus farms they believe cover the state. Question 11 of 12 Of Mice and Men is a story about two men who are: Slaves Fugitives Correct 1 / 1 Points Migrant ranch workers. George Milton and Lennie Small travel around California working on ranches during the Great Depression. Incorrect / 1 Points Migrant ranch workers. George Milton and Lennie Small travel around California working on ranches during the Great Depression.

Question 12 of 12 12. Question The title of the novella by Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men is taken from a poem. Who wrote the poem, Of a Mouse, inspired the title? John Steinbeck Robert Burns Correct 1 / 1 Points Robert Burns. The title of the book was inspired by the poem Of a Mouse by Robert Burns: The best laid schemes o mice an men / Gang aft agley. (The best laid schemes of mice and men / Go oft awy.). Incorrect / 1 Points Robert Burns. The title of the book was inspired by the poem Of a Mouse by Robert Burns: The best laid schemes o mice an men / Gang aft agley. (The best laid schemes of mice and men / Go oft awy.). About John Steinbeck, Author of The Grapes of Wrath | Steinbeck Now January 19, 2017 About John Steinbeck Four American writers born at the turn of the century defined modern America: John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway.

Steinbeck’s Place Among Modern American Writers Among these American writers, only John Steinbeck lived long enough to experience the turbulent 1960s and frame important issues that trouble us today—political tyranny, economic inequality, and the willful destruction of our planet. Uniquely, books by author John Steinbeck depict the suffering of individuals with the goal of helping the masses understand other people and cope with their own lives. Steinbeck was the youngest of the four American writers and the most hopeful about the future, despite personal problems, political enemies, and attacks by critics. Books by author celebrities always attract opposition from academics, pundits, and politicians, but Steinbeck received more than his share. In The Grapes of Wrath Steinbeck taught Americans how to feel empathy for the downtrodden, the despised, and the dispossessed. Like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and other books by author-activists from an earlier era, Steinbeck’s proletarian novel—and its popular movie adaptation—mobilized public opinion as few books by other modern American writers succeeded in doing.

Like Stowe’s 19th century antislavery story, Steinbeck’s 20th century epic of the Joads, Dust Bowl migrants in Depression-era California, has been translated everywhere and has never been out of print. The Years Before The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, a small California community dominated by agricultural and business interests—the kind of self-satisfied American town satirized in Winesburg, Ohio, one of Steinbeck’s favorite books by author Sherwood Anderson. The Mexican province of Alta California had been annexed by the United States a half-century earlier. In contrast to nearby Monterey—an historic and multicultural coastal town not far away—Salinas was an inland community populated primarily by whites. Many American writers of the period rebelled against the racism and rituals of hometowns like Salinas. John Steinbeck was no exception. As a child Steinbeck was a dreamer who didn’t quite fit the expectations of others, with a gift of invention for tall tales and written stories. As an adult he labored in solitude developing his craft, but didn’t publish his first novel until 1929, a month before the stock market crashed.

He attended Stanford University off and on, taking the courses he liked, exploring San Francisco on weekends, and working at odd jobs to support his writing. In 1925 he hopped a freighter to New York, where he hauled cement at Madison Square Garden, worked unsuccessfully as a newspaper reporter, and failed to find a publisher for the short stories he ground out in a rented room. Growing up amidst the fertile fields and gentle hills surrounding Salinas, Steinbeck enjoyed working with his hands and being outdoors. During summers and semesters away from Stanford, he dug ditches, tested sugar content, and labored alongside Mexicans, Filipinos, and others who provided rich material for his fiction. While British and American writers like Fitzgerald and Hemingway were leading exciting lives as expatriates in 1920s Paris, Steinbeck pursued a contrary avenue of escape as a property caretaker in isolated Lake Tahoe. There he met Carol Henning, a kindred spirit from San Jose, California. A rebellious extrovert with a steady job in San Francisco, she was a good match for the struggling young writer, and they eventually got married. Her liberal politics further developed Steinbeck’s growing social consciousness.

Not long before their marriage the couple moved to Pacific Grove, California, where they attracted a circle of free-thinking friends and rising American writers from nearby Carmel and Monterey. For a period they lived in a funky part of Los Angeles, then in lush Los Gatos, a mountain town not far from San Jose. There Carol typed and edited John’s manuscripts and gave him the title for The Grapes of Wrath. Big Books by Author-Activists Big books by author-activists use up reservoirs of energy and emotion and the marriage didn’t last. Other American writers such as Hemingway had similar experiences. But Steinbeck was unusually shy and always feared fame, and the phenomenal success of The Grapes of Wrath in 1939 confirmed his worst anxieties about becoming a public person. Charlie Chaplin, Burgess Meredith, and a stream of stars came calling from Hollywood, where the movie version featuring Henry Fonda (who became John Steinbeck’s lifelong friend) was being filmed. Carol felt increasingly marginalized by the celebrity of her husband, one of the handful of American writers everyone was talking about. They were divorced in 1943 after living apart in California and New York.

The years preceding The Grapes of Wrath produced an outpouring of original books by author John Steinbeck. The Pastures of Heaven, To a God Unknown, In Dubious Battle, Tortilla Flat, The Long Valley, The Red Pony, and the experimental play-novelette Of Mice and Men, all are authentic works of genius that continue to inspire wonder, empathy, and understanding—what Steinbeck called participation—in readers of every age. Of Mice and Men became a Broadway hit and a major movie starring Burgess Meredith. The Grapes of Wrath became an Academy Award-winning film, dramatically depicting the dignity of displaced farm families to millions of movie-lovers who (as today) hadn’t always read the book. Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz—two other Hollywood hits of the same period adapted from works by popular American writers—couldn’t be more different from three gritty Depression-era works by author John Steinbeck. In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men, and The Grapes of Wrath were reality, not escapism. Readers recognized their truthfulness, and they inspired generations of artists and musicians beginning with the folksinger Woody Guthrie.

East of Eden achieved similar scope in 1952 and was also made into a popular film that, like The Grapes of Wrath, introduced an exciting young actor to American moviegoers and never lost its magic. Between The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden Rebelling against the Republican politics of his hometown of Salinas, Steinbeck became a New Deal Democrat and a strong supporter of FDR. When The Grapes of Wrath was denounced by conservatives, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt publicly defended the book’s accuracy. During World War II the author produced high-grade literary propaganda for the federal government and filed human-interest stories on U.S. military operations in North Africa and Italy. In 1945—married for the second time to a singer named Gwyn Conger and shuttling between California and New York—Steinbeck experimented with social satire in Cannery Row, set in post-war Monterey. Although the novel made Monterey famous and attracted tourists, it ruined Steinbeck’s relationship with former friends and, like The Grapes of Wrath, turned the establishment against him. Steinbeck’s novel The Wayward Bus, a cynical story also set in what is now known as Steinbeck Country, didn’t improve the author’s local popularity.

Nor did his bitter public divorce from his second wife after the birth of two sons. (Both boys grew up in New York, served in Vietnam, and eventually became writers. Steinbeck said he wrote East of Eden to help them understand their California roots.) Steinbeck maintained that he was always happiest in Monterey. There he met the future mythologist Joseph Campbell, a philosophical marine biologist named Edward Ricketts, and rising American writers who—like Ricketts and Campbell—deeply influenced Steinbeck’s developing thought. Eventually Steinbeck clashed with Campbell, as he did with others over his lifetime. But Ricketts—the alter ego who appears as a character in several Steinbeck novels—became the writer’s closest friend and collaborator. Together they wrote Sea of Cortez, a travel narrative and meditation on philosophical themes dramatized in Steinbeck’s fiction from the 1930s through East of Eden. Personal Depression and Recovery Ricketts was killed in 1948, shortly before Steinbeck’s divorce from Gwyn, and the double punch drove the author into a state of despair. His third wife Elaine Anderson—a Texan who had become part of the Broadway theater scene—pulled him out of his depression.

Married in 1950, the couple enjoyed an 18-year partnership as high-profile members of the Manhattan celebrity set made up of American writers, actors, and musicians just as famous as John Steinbeck. Although New York became the couple’s home and they traveled throughout the world, Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden shows that he never forgot California. Published in 1952, East of Eden was made in 1955 into the film classic starring James Dean. Steinbeck’s saga tells the story of two Salinas Valley families—the Hamiltons and the Trasks—over three generations. Other American writers of Steinbeck’s time, including Faulkner, produced similar storylines from autobiographical material. But few wrote with Steinbeck’s deep sense of personal participation or passion for the past, and only East of Eden was adapted for television as well as the movies. That may be why critics complained so bitterly about his next novel, Sweet Thursday. A slight comedy with a brittle center, it brings the characters of Cannery Row up to date—sadder, older, but no wiser—and completes the Monterey trilogy begun by Steinbeck with Tortilla Flat.

Like The Wayward Bus, Steinbeck’s 1947 novel about sexual hypocrisy and self-delusion, Sweet Thursday lacks the sense of redeeming social value required by moralists with literal minds. Most readers loved the book anyway (Steinbeck always said he wrote for the public, not the critics), and Broadway became interested. But Sweet Thursday proved to be too risqué for Oscar Hammerstein II, who collaborated with Richard Rodgers and Steinbeck to produce Pipe Dream, the musical comedy version. Hammerstein didn’t believe audiences were ready for scenes set in a whorehouse, despite the author’s warning that times had changed by 1955. Hammerstein’s sentimental treatment of Steinbeck’s tough little story diluted Steinbeck’s hardboiled characters, and the show failed. Burning Bright, Steinbeck’s avant-garde play, proved even more confusing to Manhattan theater critics. Politics and Critics Burning Bright Working with New Yorkers had been challenging for Steinbeck before. His literary agent insisted on softening the profanity in the dialog of The Grapes of Wrath, and his publisher initially rejected In Dubious Battle for failing to portray Communism (never mentioned in the book) more accurately.

Unlike Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and other American writers, however, Steinbeck generally worked well with Hollywood. Books by author-screenwriters—even those as talented as Steinbeck—don’t always translate to film without problems. When Alfred Hitchcock introduced racial stereotyping into Steinbeck’s story for the wartime film Lifeboat, the writer was so angry that he tried to have his name removed from the credits. Hitchcock, the British director of Vertigo and other thrillers shot in California, was a middle-class snob, a species Steinbeck learned to despise during his childhood in Salinas and his years in Monterey. Steinbeck reacted to Stalinist communism the same way he did to social snobbery—with vigor. His opposition to the Soviet system and his affection for the Russian people are both evident in A Russian Journal, the result of his collaboration with the photographer Robert Capa following their tour of the USSR in 1947. It was one of three trips the author made to Russia, where his work remains popular. While attacking dictatorship behind the Iron Curtain, Steinbeck was also denouncing McCarthyism, Madison Avenue, and mindless consumerism back home in America.

He disliked Eisenhower, distrusted Nixon, and actively supported Adlai Stevenson for president in 1952 and 1956. Stevenson’s individualism, idealism, and progressivism are prefigured in Steinbeck’s major fiction of the 1930s, and they continued in his novels, plays, and nonfiction up to the 1960s. The Forgotten Village, The Pearl, and Zapata—enduring examples of Steinbeck’s Stevensonian populism—are all set in Mexico, a land the writer loved almost as much as Monterey. But by the late 1950s, political reality was obtruding on the author’s hope for human brotherhood. The Short Reign of Pippin IV—Steinbeck’s caricature of current French politics—shows what happens when an idealist like Stevenson gets into office and tries to change the system. Elaine and John Steinbeck were invited to President Kennedy’s inauguration and became welcome guests in the Johnson White House, where Elaine and Lady Bird could reminisce about schooldays together at the University of Texas.

Just as First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had stood up for Steinbeck when he was under attack for writing The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck defended President Johnson from critics of American policy in Vietnam. In private Steinbeck expressed doubts about the war, but his public loyalty damaged his reputation among authors, academics, and some friends. Steinbeck made it a point to avoid criticizing other writers. Not all of them returned the favor. Steinbeck was sensitive, and the attacks hurt. The author of The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden was already old-fashioned to America’s literary establishment when (following Lewis, Faulkner, Hemingway, and the American writer Pearl Buck) he won a Nobel in Literature in 1962. Despite delivering an acceptance speech exalting individualism and damning the Cold War, Steinbeck’s war dispatches from Vietnam four years later gave his enemies ammunition, and the assault on his reputation continued even after he died. How ironic for a writer who exposed the insanity of war fever in books from Cup of Gold (his first novel) to The Moon Is Down (his World War II play-novelette).

How unfair to the author of East of Eden, depicting three bloody conflicts—the Civil War, the Indian wars, and World War I—feeding private corruption and public hysteria on a monumental scale. How painful for a father with two sons in the service. Steinbeck’s Enduring Message of Warning and Hope The 1960s were stressful for Steinbeck, and his personal decline reflects the turmoil that sensitive people suffer for unresolved inner conflicts as they age. Before his death in 1968, the author published three books that convey his deep ambivalence about developments in America. Travels with Charley, The Winter of Our Discontent, America and Americans—uneven experiments in fiction, fact, and form—all portray a post-moral culture using post-modernist literary techniques. Each book sold well despite Steinbeck’s darkening outlook. The Winter of Our Discontent ends ambiguously, leaving readers to wonder what will become of its flawed hero, Ethan Hawley. Like The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, the ending of Steinbeck’s last novel allows readers to participate by imagining for themselves how things will turn out. Survival and destruction are equally possible outcomes in Steinbeck’s most memorable novels.

He loved music with a passion, but his best pieces end without a final chord. Taken together, Steinbeck’s three final books diagnose symptoms of social decay—racism and homophobia, consumerism and corruption, environmental destruction and deadening self-involvement—that continue today. Unlike Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and other modern American writers, John Steinbeck remains fresh and relevant to contemporary readers of almost every age and type, raising questions of power and poverty, individualism and community, in warning and in hope. About John Steinbeck Most read American writer of the 20th century. Born in California. Died in New York. Romantic. Realist. Rebel. More about John Steinbeck SparkNotes: East of Eden: Context East of Eden Table of Contents Plot Overview John Steinbeck is perhaps the quintessential California novelist. Born in Salinas, California, in 1902, he went on to create a body of work that is closely connected to the land, people, and history of his home state.

As a young man, Steinbeck worked as a hired hand on farms and ranches throughout the Salinas Valley, forming lasting impressions of the land and its people that would influence virtually all of his later work. Meanwhile, his father, a local government official, and his mother, a former schoolteacher, encouraged his burgeoning interest in writing. After finishing high school, Steinbeck started at Stanford University in Palo Alto but left before finishing his degree in order to pursue work as a reporter in New York City. He returned to California the following year, supporting his writing endeavors with a steady income from manual labor. The first three novels Steinbeck published—Cup of Gold (1929), The Pastures of Heaven (1932), and To a God Unknown (1933)—were critical and commercial failures. He persisted in his writing, however, and attracted more positive notices with Tortilla Flat (1935), a collection of stories about the ethnic working poor in California. Of Mice and Men (1937) brought him increased acclaim, and then The Grapes of Wrath (1939) earned him widespread fame and the Pulitzer Prize.

The story of a family of migrant farmers making the difficult journey from Oklahoma to California during the Great Depression, The Grapes of Wrath was hailed as an instant classic and a landmark of socially conscious American fiction. Steinbeck’s novels are acclaimed for their combination of realistic naturalism and moral optimism—two qualities not commonly found together. Steinbeck portrayed the pain, poverty, and wickedness of the world with unsparing detail while at the same time maintained a belief in the “perfectibility of man.” This optimism pervades Steinbeck’s fiction, leavening even his gloomiest accounts of the Great Depression with a powerful sense of hope. The sweeping California epic East of Eden (1952) is considered Steinbeck’s most ambitious work and the masterpiece of his later artistic career. Indeed, although The Grapes of Wrath is more famous and widely read, Steinbeck himself regarded East of Eden as his greatest novel. He wrote that he believed he had imbued East of Eden with everything he knew about writing and everything he knew about good and evil in the human condition.

Though its story is not autobiographical, East of Eden does delve into the world of Steinbeck’s childhood, incorporating his memories of the Salinas Valley in the early years of the twentieth century, his memories of the war era, and his memories of his relatives, many of whom are secondary characters in the novel. (Samuel Hamilton was indeed Steinbeck’s grandfather, Olive Hamilton was Steinbeck’s mother, and Aron Trask’s gloomy experience at Stanford University is to some degree based on Steinbeck’s own unsatisfying years there.) East of Eden, which was a bestseller upon its publication, cemented Steinbeck’s position as one of the most read and beloved American writers of his time. The novel was not, however, a great critical success, as a number of reviewers believed that Steinbeck’s epic portrait of the human struggle between good and evil was painted so broadly that it detracted from the detail and believability of his portrayals of individual characters. Despite these mixed critical reviews, Steinbeck continued to write and produced several more works, notably the popular nonfiction piece Travels with Charley (1962). For his contributions to twentieth-century fiction, Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.

He died in New York City in 1968 and was buried in his hometown of Salinas. Biblical Background The story of Adam and Eve and the story of their sons, Cain and Abel, form the foundation of the narrative of East of Eden. The stories, which appear in Genesis, the first book of the Bible, are the basis of Steinbeck’s exploration of the conflict between good and evil in human life. The Story of Adam and Eve The book of Genesis opens with the story of creation. After creating the world in six days, God declares his intention to make a being in his own image. He then creates humankind. God fashions a man out of dust and names him Adam. Then, God forms a woman out of Adam’s rib, and Adam names her Eve. God places Adam and Eve on Earth in the idyllic garden of Eden. He encourages them to procreate and to enjoy the created world fully but forbids them to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which grows in the garden. One day in the garden, Satan approaches Eve in the form of a crafty serpent.

He convinces her to eat the tree’s forbidden fruit, assuring her that she will not suffer if she does so. Eve eats from the tree and then shares the fruit with Adam, and the two immediately are filled with shame and remorse. God discovers Adam and Eve’s disobedience. In punishment, God curses Eve to suffer painful childbirth and to submit to her husband’s authority; he curses Adam to toil and work the ground for food. God then banishes Adam and Eve from Eden. The Story of Cain and Abel Sent out into the world, Adam and Eve give birth to two sons, Cain and Abel. Cain becomes a farmer, Abel a shepherd. One day, the two brothers bring sacrifices to God. Cain offers God grain from his fields, while Abel offers the fattest portion of his flocks. For an unknown reason, God favors Abel’s offering over Cain’s. Cain, out of jealousy, murders Abel. When God sees that Abel is missing and asks Cain where Abel is, Cain retorts, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” God realizes that Abel is dead and punishes Cain by condemning him to exile.

When Cain protests that the punishment is too severe and will put his life in danger, God puts a mark on Cain to warn others not to harm or kill him, for if they do so, they will be punished sevenfold. God then banishes Cain from his home to wander in the land of Nod, which lies to the east of Eden. More Help Biography in Depth | The Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies | San Jose State University The Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies [an error occurred while processing this directive] [an error occurred while processing this directive] Steinbeck in 1909 with his sister Mary, sitting on the red pony, Jill, at the Salinas Fairgrounds. John Steinbeck, American Writer by Dr. Susan Shillinglaw John Steinbeck was born in the farming town of Salinas, California on 27 February 1902. His father, John Ernst Steinbeck, was not a terribly successful man; at one time or another he was the manager of a Sperry flour plant, the owner of a feed and grain store, the treasurer of Monterey County. His mother, the strong-willed Olive Hamilton Steinbeck, was a former teacher.

As a child growing up in the fertile Salinas Valley —called the "Salad Bowl of the Nation" — Steinbeck formed a deep appreciation of his environment, not only the rich fields and hills surrounding Salinas, but also the nearby Pacific coast where his family spent summer weekends. "I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers," he wrote in the opening chapter of East of Eden. "I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer-and what trees and seasons smelled like." The observant, shy but often mischievous only son had, for the most part, a happy childhood growing up with two older sisters, Beth and Esther, and a much-adored younger sister, Mary. Never wealthy, the family was nonetheless prominent in the small town of 3,000, for both parents engaged in community activities. Mr. Steinbeck was a Mason, Mrs. Steinbeck a member of the Order of the Eastern Star and founder of The Wanderers, a women's club that traveled vicariously through monthly reports. While the elder Steinbecks established their identities by sending roots deep in the community, their son was something of a rebel.

Respectable Salinas circumscribed the restless and imaginative young John Steinbeck and he defined himself against "Salinas thinking." At age fourteen he decided to be a writer and spent hours as a teenager living in a world of his own making, writing stories and poems in his upstairs bedroom. To please his parents he enrolled at Stanford University in 1919; to please himself he signed on only for those courses that interested him: classical and British literature, writing courses, and a smattering of science. The President of the English Club said that Steinbeck, who regularly attended meetings to read his stories aloud, "had no other interests or talents that I could make out. He was a writer, but he was that and nothing else" (Benson 69). Writing was, indeed, his passion, not only during the Stanford years but throughout his life. From 1919 to 1925, when he finally left Stanford without taking a degree, Steinbeck dropped in and out of the University, sometimes to work closely with migrants and bindlestiffs on California ranches.

Those relationships, coupled with an early sympathy for the weak and defenseless, deepened his empathy for workers, the disenfranchised, the lonely and dislocated, an empathy that is characteristic in his work. After leaving Stanford, he briefly tried construction work and newspaper reporting in New York City, and then returned to his native state in order to hone his craft. In the late 1920s, during a three-year stint as a caretaker for a Lake Tahoe estate, he wrote several drafts of his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929) about the pirate Henry Morgan, and met the woman who would become his first wife, Carol Henning, a San Jose native. After their marriage in 1930, he and Carol settled, rent-free, into the Steinbeck family's summer cottage in Pacific Grove, she to search for jobs to support them, he to continue writing.

During the decade of the 1930s Steinbeck wrote most of his best California fiction: The Pastures of Heaven (1932), To a God Unknown (1933), The Long Valley (1938), Tortilla Flat (1935), In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939). To a God Unknown, second written and third published, tells of patriarch Joseph Wayne's domination of and obsession with the land. Mystical and powerful, the novel testifies to Steinbeck's awareness of an essential bond between humans and the environments they inhabit. In a journal entry kept while working on this novel - a practice he continued all his life — the young author wrote: "the trees and the muscled mountains are the world — but not the world apart from man — the world and man — the one inseparable unit man and his environment. Why they should ever have been understood as being separate I do not know." His conviction that characters must be seen in the context of their environments remained constant throughout his career.

His was not a man-dominated universe, but an interrelated whole, where species and the environment were seen to interact, where commensal bonds between people, among families, with nature were acknowledged. By 1933, Steinbeck had found his terrain; had chiseled a prose style that was more naturalistic, and far less strained than in his earliest novels; and had claimed his people - not the respectable, smug Salinas burghers, but those on the edges of polite society. Steinbeck's California fiction, from To a God Unknown to East of Eden (1952) envisions the dreams and defeats of common people shaped by the environments they inhabit. Undoubtedly his ecological, holistic vision was determined both by his early years roaming the Salinas hills and by his long and deep friendship with the remarkable Edward Flanders Ricketts, a marine biologist.

Founder of Pacific Biological Laboratories, a marine lab eventually housed on Cannery Row in Monterey, Ed was a careful observer of inter-tidal life: "I grew to depend on his knowledge and on his patience in research," Steinbeck writes in "About Ed Ricketts," an essay composed after his friend's death in 1948 and published with The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951). Ed Ricketts's influence on Steinbeck, however, struck far deeper than the common chord of detached observation. Ed was a lover of Gregorian chants and Bach; Spengler and Krishnamurti; Whitman and Li Po. His mind "knew no horizons," writes Steinbeck. In addition, Ricketts was remarkable for a quality of acceptance; he accepted people as they were and he embraced life as he found it. This quality he called non-teleological or "is" thinking, a perspective that Steinbeck also assumed in much of his fiction during the 1930s. He wrote with a "detached quality," simply recording what "is." The working title for Of Mice and Men, for example, was "Something That Happened "- this is simply the way life is.

Furthermore, in most of his fiction Steinbeck includes a "Doc" figure, a wise observer of life who epitomizes the idealized stance of the non-teleological thinker: Doc Burton in In Dubious Battle, Slim in Of Mice and Men, Casy in The Grapes of Wrath, Lee in East of Eden, and of course "Doc" himself in Cannery Row (1945) and the sequel, the rollicking Sweet Thursday (1954). All see broadly and truly and empathetically. Ed Ricketts, patient and thoughtful, a poet and a scientist, helped ground the author's ideas. He was Steinbeck's mentor, his alter ego, and his soul mate. Considering the depth of his eighteen-year friendship with Ricketts, it is hardly surprising that the bond acknowledged most frequently in Steinbeck's oeuvre is friendship between and among men. Steinbeck's writing style as well as his social consciousness of the 1930s was also shaped by an equally compelling figure in his life, his wife Carol. She helped edit his prose, urged him to cut the Latinate phrases, typed his manuscripts, suggested titles, and offered ways to restructure.

In 1935, having finally published his first popular success with tales of Monterey's paisanos, Tortilla Flat, Steinbeck, goaded by Carol, attended a few meetings of nearby Carmel's John Reed Club. Although he found the group's zealotry distasteful, he, like so many intellectuals of the 1930s, was drawn to the communists' sympathy for the working man. Farm workers in California suffered. He set out to write a "biography of a strikebreaker," but from his interviews with a hounded organizer hiding out in nearby Seaside, he turned from biography to fiction, writing one of the best strike novels of the 1900s, In Dubious Battle. Never a partisan novel, it dissects with a steady hand both the ruthlessness of the strike organizers and the rapaciousness of the greedy landowners. What the author sees as dubious about the struggle between organizers and farmers is not who will win but how profound is the effect on the workers trapped in between, manipulated by both interests. At the height of his powers, Steinbeck followed this large canvas with two books that round-out what might be called his labor trilogy.

The tightly-focused Of Mice and Men was one of the first in a long line of "experiments," a word he often used to identify a forthcoming project. This "play-novelette," intended to be both a novella and a script for a play, is a tightly-drafted study of bindlestiffs through whose dreams he wanted to represent the universal longings for a home. Both the text and the critically-acclaimed 1937 Broadway play (which won the 1937-1938 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best play) made Steinbeck a household name, assuring his popularity and, for some, his infamy. His next novel intensified popular debate about Steinbeck's gritty subjects, his uncompromising sympathy for the disenfranchised, and his "crass" language. The Grapes of Wrath sold out an advance edition of 19,804 by 1939 mid-April; was selling 10,000 copies per week by early May; and had won the Pulitzer Prize for the year (1940).

Published at the apex of the Depression, the book about dispossessed farmers captured the decade's angst as well as the nation's legacy of fierce individualism, visionary prosperity, and determined westward movement. It was, like the best of Steinbeck's novels, informed in part by documentary zeal, in part by Steinbeck's ability to trace mythic and biblical patterns. Lauded by critics nationwide for its scope and intensity, The Grapes of Wrath attracted an equally vociferous minority opinion. Oklahoma congressman Lyle Boren said that the dispossessed Joad's story was a "dirty, lying, filthy manuscript." Californians claimed the novel was a scourge on the state's munificence, and an indignant Kern County, its migrant population burgeoning, banned the book well into the 1939-1945 war. The righteous attacked the book's language or its crass gestures: Granpa's struggle to keep his fly buttoned was not, it seemed to some, fit for print. The Grapes of Wrath was a cause celebre.

The author abandoned the field, exhausted from two years of research trips and personal commitment to the migrants' woes, from the five-month push to write the final version, from a deteriorating marriage to Carol, and from an unnamed physical malady. He retreated to Ed Ricketts and science, announcing his intention to study seriously marine biology and to plan a collecting trip to the Sea of Cortez. The text Steinbeck and Ricketts published in 1941, Sea of Cortez (reissued in 1951 without Ed Ricketts's catalogue of species as The Log from the Sea of Cortez), tells the story of that expedition. It does more, however. The Log portion that Steinbeck wrote (from Ed's notes) in 1940 - at the same time working on a film in Mexico, The Forgotten Village - contains his and Ed's philosophical musings, his ecological perspective, as well as keen observations on Mexican peasantry, hermit crabs, and "dryball" scientists.

Quipped New York Times critic Lewis Gannett, there is, in Sea of Cortez, more "of the whole man, John Steinbeck, than any of his novels": Steinbeck the keen observer of life, Steinbeck the scientist, the seeker of truth, the historian and journalist, the writer. Steinbeck was determined to participate in the war effort, first doing patriotic work (The Moon Is Down, 1942, a play-novelette about an occupied Northern European country, and Bombs Away, 1942, a portrait of bomber trainees) and then going overseas for the New York Herald Tribune as a war correspondent. In his war dispatches he wrote about the neglected corners of war that many journalists missed - life at a British bomber station, the allure of Bob Hope, the song "Lili Marlene," and a diversionary mission off the Italian coast. These columns were later collected in Once There Was a War(1958). Immediately after returning to the States, a shattered Steinbeck wrote a nostalgic and lively account of his days on Cannery Row, Cannery Row (1945).

In 1945, however, few reviewers recognized that the book's central metaphor, the tide pool, suggested a way to read this non-teleological novel that examined the "specimens" who lived on Monterey's Cannery Row, the street Steinbeck knew so well. Steinbeck often felt misunderstood by book reviewers and critics, and their barbs rankled the sensitive writer, and would throughout his career. A book resulting from a post-war trip to the Soviet Union with Robert Capa in 1947, A Russian Journal (1948), seemed to many superficial. Reviewers seemed doggedly either to misunderstand his biological naturalism or to expect him to compose another strident social critique like The Grapes of Wrath. Commonplace phrases echoed in reviews of books of the 1940s and other "experimental" books of the 1950s and 1960s: "complete departure," "unexpected." A humorous text like Cannery Row seemed fluff to many. Set in La Paz, Mexico, The Pearl (1947), a "folk tale. .

.a black-white story like a parable" as he wrote his agent, tells of a young man who finds an astounding pearl, loses his freedom in protecting his wealth, and finally throws back into the sea the cause of his woes. Reviews noted this as another slim volume by a major author of whom more was expected. The Wayward Bus (1947), a "cosmic Bus," sputtered as well. Steinbeck faltered both professionally and personally in the 1940s. He divorced the loyal but volatile Carol in 1943. That same year he moved east with his second wife, Gwyndolen Conger, a lovely and talented woman nearly twenty years his junior who ultimately came to resent his growing stature and feel that her own creativity - she was a singer - had been stifled. With Gwyn, Steinbeck had two sons, Thom and John, but the marriage started falling apart shortly after the second son's birth, ending in divorce in 1948. That same year Steinbeck was numbed by Ed Ricketts's death. Only with concentrated work on a film script on the life of Emiliano Zapata for Elia Kazan's film Viva Zapata!

(1952) would Steinbeck gradually chart a new course. In 1949 he met and in 1950 married his third wife, Elaine Scott, and with her he moved again to New York City, where he lived for the rest of his life. Much of the pain and reconciliation of those late years of the 1940s were worked out in two subsequent novels: his third play-novelette Burning Bright (1950), a boldly experimental parable about a man's acceptance of his wife's child fathered by another man, and in the largely autobiographical work he'd contemplated since the early 1930s, East of Eden (1952).

"It is what I have been practicing to write all of my life," he wrote to painter and author Bo Beskow early in 1948, when he first began research for a novel about his native valley and his people; three years later when he finished the manuscript he wrote his friend again, "This is 'the book'...Always I had this book waiting to be written." With Viva Zapata!, East of Eden,Burning Bright and later The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Steinbeck's fiction becomes less concerned with the behavior of groups - what he called in the 1930s "group man" - and more focused on an individual's moral responsibility to self and community. The detached perspective of the scientist gives way to a certain warmth; the ubiquitous "self-character" that he claimed appeared in all his novels to comment and observe is modeled less on Ed Ricketts, more on John Steinbeck himself. Certainly with his divorce from Gwyn, Steinbeck had endured dark nights of the soul, and East of Eden contains those turbulent emotions surrounding the subject of wife, children, family, and fatherhood.

"In a sense it will be two books," he wrote in his journal (posthumously published in 1969 as Journal of a Novel: The "East of Eden" Letters) as he began the final draft in 1951, "the story of my country and the story of me. And I shall keep these two separate." Early critics dismissed as incoherent the two-stranded story of the Hamiltons, his mother's family, and the Trasks, "symbol people" representing the story of Cain and Abel; more recently critics have come to recognize that the epic novel is an early example of metafiction, exploring the role of the artist as creator, a concern, in fact, in many of his books. Like The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden is a defining point in his career. During the 1950s and 1960s the perpetually "restless" Steinbeck traveled extensively throughout the world with his third wife, Elaine. With her, he became more social.

Perhaps his writing suffered as a result; some claim that even East of Eden, his most ambitious post-Grapes novel, cannot stand shoulder to shoulder with his searing social novels of the 1930s. In the fiction of his last two decades, however, Steinbeck never ceased to take risks, to stretch his conception of the novel's structure, to experiment with the sound and form of language. Sweet Thursday, sequel to Cannery Row, was written as a musical comedy that would resolve Ed Ricketts's loneliness by sending him off into the sunset with a true love, Suzy, a whore with a gilded heart. The musical version by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Pipe Dream , was one of the team's few failures. In 1957 he published the satiric The Short Reign of Pippin IV, a tale about the French Monarchy gaining ascendancy. And in 1961, he published his last work of fiction, the ambitious The Winter of Our Discontent, a novel about contemporary America set in a fictionalized Sag Harbor (where he and Elaine had a summer home).

Increasingly disillusioned with American greed, waste, and spongy morality - his own sons seemed textbook cases - he wrote his jeremiad, a lament for an ailing populace. The following year, 1962, Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature; the day after the announcement the New York Times ran an editorial by the influential Arthur Mizener, "Does a Writer with a Moral Vision of the 1930s Deserve the Nobel Prize?" Wounded by the blindside attack, unwell, frustrated and disillusioned, John Steinbeck wrote no more fiction. But the writer John Steinbeck was not silenced. As always, he wrote reams of letters to his many friends and associates. In the 1950s and 1960s he published scores of journalistic pieces: "Making of a New Yorker," "I Go Back to Ireland," columns about the 1956 national political conventions, and "Letters to Alicia," a controversial series about a 1966 White House-approved trip to Vietnam where his sons were stationed.

In the late 1950s — and intermittently for the rest of his life — he worked diligently on a modern English translation of a book he had loved since childhood, Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur; the unfinished project was published posthumously as The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976). Immediately after completing Winter , the ailing novelist proposed "not a little trip of reporting," he wrote to his agent Elizabeth Otis, "but a frantic last attempt to save my life and the integrity of my creativity pulse." In 1960, he toured America in a camper truck designed to his specifications, and on his return published the highly praised Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), another book that both celebrates American individuals and decries American hypocrisy; the climax of his journey is his visit to the New Orleans "cheerleaders" who daily taunted black children newly registered in white schools. His disenchantment with American waste, greed, immorality and racism ran deep.

His last published book,America and Americans (1966), reconsiders the American character, the land, the racial crisis, and the seemingly crumbling morality of the American people. In these late years, in fact since his final move to New York in 1950, many accused John Steinbeck of increasing conservatism. True enough that with greater wealth came the chance to spend money more freely. And with status came political opportunities that seemed out of step for a "radical" of the 1930s: he initially defended Lyndon Johnson's views on the war with Vietnam (dying before he could, as he wished, qualify his initial responses). And true enough that the man who spent a lifetime "whipping" his sluggard will (read Working Days: The Journals of "The Grapes of Wrath" [1989] for biting testimony of the struggle) felt intolerance for 1960s protesters whose zeal, in his eyes, was unfocused and whose anger was explosive, not turned to creative solutions. But it is far more accurate to say that the author who wrote The Grapes of Wrathnever retreated into conservatism.

He lived in modest houses all his life, caring little for lavish displays of power or wealth. He always preferred talking to ordinary citizens wherever he traveled, sympathizing always with the disenfranchised. He was a Stevenson Democrat in the 1950s. Even in the 1930s, he was never a communist, and after three trips to Russia (1937, 1947, 1963) he hated with increasing intensity Soviet repression of the individual. In fact, neither during his life nor after has the paradoxical Steinbeck been an easy author to pigeonhole personally, politically, or artistically. As a man, he was an introvert and at the same time had a romantic streak, was impulsive, garrulous, a lover of jests and word play and practical jokes. As an artist, he was a ceaseless experimenter with words and form, and often critics did not "see" quite what he was up to. He claimed his books had "layers," yet many claimed his symbolic touch was cumbersome. He loved humor and warmth, but some said he slopped over into sentimentalism. He was, and is now recognized as, an environmental writer.

He was an intellectual, passionately interested in his odd little inventions, in jazz, in politics, in philosophy, history, and myth - this range from an author sometimes labeled simplistic by academe. All said, Steinbeck remains one of America's most significant twentieth-century writers, whose popularity spans the world, whose range is impressive, whose output was prodigious: 16 novels, a collection of short stories, four screenplays (The Forgotten Village, The Red Pony, Viva Zapata!, Lifeboat ), a sheaf of journalistic essays - including four collections (Bombs Away, Once There Was a War, America and Americans, The Harvest Gypsies) — three travel narratives (Sea of Cortez, A Russian Journal, Travels with Charley), a translation and two published journals (more remain unpublished). Three "play-novelettes" ran on Broadway: Of Mice and Men, The Moon Is Down, and Burning Bright, as did the musicalPipe Dream. Whatever his "experiment" in fiction or journalistic prose, he wrote with empathy, clarity, perspicuity: "In every bit of honest writing in the world," he noted in a 1938 journal entry, "...there is a base theme.

Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love."

Question: Who wrote East of Eden, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath?
Answer: John Steinbeck