John Steinbeck :: Literary America John Steinbeck Born in a substantial Victorian house on the most respectable street in Salinas, California, John Steinbeck fought throughout his youth not to live up to his mother’s expectations. A shy boy, conscious that he wasn’t good-looking and prone to sudden fits of anger, he spent much of his time up in his room poring over books. His preferred the legend of King Arthur and his Round Table, and similar works of fantasy with high morals and high adventure. The child grew up to be a man with a gift for telling tales, a keen sense of the world’s injustices and the willingness to take on great themes. Perhaps, if he had heeded his mother’s wishes, he could have become a great trial lawyer. But young Steinbeck got it into his head that he wanted to be a writer. And write he did—first pages and pages of forgettable stuff—until his hard work and conviction finally paid off. Over an almost 40-year career, Steinbeck made California the setting for the Cain and Abel saga (East of Eden), the Promised Land (The Grapes of Wrath), and a heaven beset by tragedy (Pastures of Heaven).

His beloved Monterey became the home to a round table of errant knights (Tortilla Flat). He turned Monterey’s Cannery Row into a household name, though arguably for all the wrong reasons. He became one of the most successful authors of the 20th century. The Early Struggles The Steinbeck house still stands in Salinas. It has become a combination museum and restaurant. Ornamented with gables, gingerbread, and a turret, it is no stretch to imagine the young John Steinbeck upstairs, pretending he was in a castle. Steinbeck’s mother reigned over the house. Her husband, John Ernst Steinbeck, had a mild personality 1 and was not the most able manager. In 1910, he ran a healthy flour milling company into the ground, then retreated to the sanctity of his upstairs bedroom. After a time, he decided to strike out on his own in business, but that venture—a feed store—also went under. John Ernst settled into deep despair over his public failure and loss of status. The townspeople of Salinas came together for the Steinbecks and helped them. A job was found for him at the Spreckels Sugar Company.

Though the Steinbecks remained in their home, their standing in the community restored, a son’s faith in his father was damaged. And seeing his father and mother’s reaction to their fall from grace may have given birth to John Steinbeck’s later skepticism about the bourgeois need to preserve status. He developed a sympathy for the working class at the age of 17 when his father got him a job at Spreckels, where he worked for several summers. Another summer, again through family connections, he labored building a slough from Castroville to Salinas, a job in which he learned how to use dynamite. His mother’s ambition, though, was that he attend college. And so, in 1919, Steinbeck went away to Stanford, where tuition was free at the time. At Stanford, the only topics that interested him were writing and marine biology. His relationship with Stanford lasted for five years but never resulted in a diploma. He dropped in and out of school, returning to physical labor whenever he took a leave.

In 1925, after his last unsuccessful stint at Stanford, Steinbeck assumed what he believed was the unapologetically squalid life of a writer: drinking, pounding away at an old typewriter in a tackroom behind a slatternly house in Palo Alto. The house belonged to a published writer named John Breck (though her real name was Elizabeth Anderson, and she hadn’t been published often) in her late 30’s. 2 She provided an audience for his stories and a comfort and aid during his dark nights of the soul. Steinbeck was veering inexorably away from the middle class life that his mother had envisioned for him, and into an uncertain and rather unpromising future. After bouncing out of college in June of 1925, Steinbeck landed a job as a caretaker of a lodge at Fallen Leaf Lake, near Lake Tahoe, where he put his dynamiting skills to good use building a dam. Laboring in virtual isolation much of the time, he poured his remaining energy into writing. After a summer of this grueling and lonely routine he determined that he must go to New York, the publishing capitol of the United States.

With his savings from the caretaking job he took a freighter through the Panama Canal and up to New York. Steinbeck wound up working on the construction of Madison Square Garden and part time as a reporter. The hard labor exhausted him and left him with no time to write what he wanted to write. The pay was just enough to sustain him. Every piece of creative writing he submitted was rejected. So back he went to California, working as an assistant steward on the freighter (thus joining the ranks of Herman Melville, Langston Hughes and Sinclair Lewis—all future writers with restless souls who worked inglorious jobs on the blue ocean). He returned to the lodge at Fallen Leaf Lake, where he worked another year. By the close of 1928, John Steinbeck was quite muscular as a result of much heavy labor, still quite shy about his looks (Sherwood Anderson, upon meeting Steinbeck in the 1930’s, said he “looked like a truck driver on his day off.” 3 ) and plagued by doubts about his abilities. But he was fortunate in love—with a new girlfriend named Carol Henning—and had a finished novel named Cup of Gold under his belt.

More Hard Times, Then a Measure of Success In addition to the house in Salinas, the Steinbeck family also had a cottage in lovely Pacific Grove, next to Monterey, which they had managed to hold on to through their fiscal crisis. Steinbeck had visited here often as a child, and had, while at Stanford in 1923, taken a course taught at the Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University, the first marine laboratory on the West Coast. In 1930, he and Carol got married and they moved to the Pacific Grove cottage, within walking distance of the Marine Station. They lived on an allowance of $25 per month provided by Steinbeck’s father, who had since been restored to status with an appointment to the post of Monterey County treasurer— a job he won re-election to many times until he finally retired. As the Depression hit, the $25 per month was a godsend. And Steinbeck made it part of his lore, along with the fact that he and his wife had made ends meet by fishing.

They fished from the rocks near China Point, home of the Hopkins Marine Station and scene of the ruins of what had been a fascinating ramshackle maze of Chinese squid fishermen’s shacks that had mysteriously burned to the water line in 1906. Steinbeck had visited that spot often since his youth. 4 But what sustained the couple’s hopes through the early 1930’s were Steinbeck’s ideas. Carol was, for years, a willing and understanding helpmeet. She typed many of his early manuscripts, correcting his punctuation and spelling. (It was also she who later suggested the titles of Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath.) She believed in his promise, even when times were so tight that, as legend has it, they had to sell their two ducks in order to buy writing paper for To a God Unknown. 5 The young couple would have to be patient, waiting for success that did not come with the first novel. Steinbeck’s first published book was Cup of Gold (1932), a fictional account of the life of the pirate Henry Morgan.

The novel, written in an enthusiastic stream of prose, was marketed in a way that made it hard to take seriously, with a swashbuckling buccaneer manning the cover. Steinbeck, showing his usual self-recrimination, wished he had destroyed it. Pastures of Heaven was published in the same year, a series of connected short stories that take place in a lush California valley. Steinbeck’s first critical and commercial success was Tortilla Flat (1936), about a young, poor man named Danny who suddenly becomes a landowner when he inherits two houses in the district above the town of Monterey. Thus begins a series of picaresque episodes as Danny’s drunken friends take advantage of his generosity. The tone is light-hearted—they are all happy paisanos—but the abasement of poverty is never far from sight, as much a part of the setting as lively Monterey herself. Ed Ricketts Back in 1923, while taking the marine biology course at Stanford, Steinbeck had encountered a theory/philosophy that was to inform his writing for years to come.

The teacher of the course was an enthusiastic proponent of the “organismal” theory of William Emerson Ritter, which held that individual man lived as part of a greater being—the “superorganism”— made up of many more humans unconsciously acting in concert. As Steinbeck learned, this pattern existed among certain marine organisms. It is also true of some members of the insect kingdom. In 1930, when Steinbeck met Doctor Ed Ricketts, he was delighted to find another believer in the organismal theory, and one who was a good drinker, conversationalist and womanizer to boot. Ricketts was a marine biologist and entrepreneur. In 1923 he had established a business called Pacific Biological Laboratories, whose whimsical logo was a squid with its tentacles wrapped around a piece of driftwood bearing the company’s name. The firm collected biological specimens from the ocean and coastline and sold them to schools and other research-oriented organizations. Ricketts was also a philosopher. He not only studied the behavior of marine life in groups but applied his observations to the actions of men in groups as well.

And out of that he developed a philosophy he called “non-teleological thinking,” which held that it was not necessary to keep asking, “why?” Why try to establish why people or organisms behaved in the way they did? They just did, and that was all. To gain a real acceptance of this fact was to realize that every living thing was holy. Ricketts became the model for the character called “The Doc” in Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, and appeared in a short story called “The Snake” in The Long Valley. His beliefs also took a strong hold in Steinbeck, and they contributed to Steinbeck’s brand of realism. Sometimes, in Steinbeck’s tales, one grim event comes after another. To Ricketts’ way of thinking, and Steinbeck’s, that’s life. Ricketts’ lab was also a gathering spot for writers and thinkers, among them Henry Miller and Joseph Campbell (author of The Power of Myth), one of the scenes of the cross-pollination of writers and thinkers that took root in the American literary landscape. Steinbeck was lucky to have found such a good friend as Ed Ricketts.

But he would have been well-advised to spend less time at the lab and more time at home, what with the likes of the handsome Campbell around—not to mention the notorious Miller. Ricketts helped Steinbeck expand the reach of his California chronicles. He collaborated with Steinbeck on a project of cataloging the sea life in the Gulf of California, which was published as Sea of Cortez in 1941 and republished in 1951 as The Log from the Sea of Cortez. The Grapes of Wrath As the Depression wore on, its impact on California— particularly the fertile areas up around Salinas that Steinbeck knew so well—was extreme. From the prairies of panhandle Texas to Oklahoma, years of poor crop rotation had led to light, blowaway topsoil. And then, as the decade of the 1930’s began, like a plague from the heavens the rain stopped falling and fierce winds coursed across those flat regions, sucking up all of the topsoil with them. Known as “black blizzards,” the wind storms devastated a vast swath of formerly rich land.

The farmers, who relied on loans from the banks to tide them over from planting season until harvest, faced a credit crunch. They were foreclosed on by the thousands. Too many of them piled into jalopies with all of their possessions and headed out to California where, rumor had it, there were still agricultural jobs to be had (and at good wages). In the mid-1930’s, Steinbeck wrote to a friend that within a few miles of where he and Carol lived (in relative ease, by then, after the success of his latest books), “there are about five thousand families starving to death…not just hungry but actually starving.” 6 When Steinbeck was approached by a newspaperman from San Francisco to write a series of stories about the plight of migrant farmers in California, he accepted. He bought an old bakery truck and installed a stove, a bed, and a few other conveniences. Then he pointed what he called his “pie wagon” towards Route 99, which runs through California’s Central Valley until it bumps up against the base of “the Grapevine” north of Los Angeles. All along the route, in Stockton, Fresno and Arvin, and spaces in between, migrant workers had established squatters’ camps.

They looked, from a distance, “like a city dump.” 7 And he was filled with indignation at the lot of these “harvest gypsies,” as he called them, who were forced to move around to follow the crops but were nowhere wanted. Steinbeck’s articles appeared in the San Francisco News. And inside him a bad book was growing. Named “L’Affaire Lettuceberg,” it was so poor in fact, that Carol reviewed it in two words. “Burn it,” 8 she said. Steinbeck followed Carol’s advice. Meanwhile, he had another book coming out: Of Mice and Men, published in 1936. It did extremely well. In order to evade the media attention, Steinbeck and Carol sailed to Europe. After they returned in 1937, he went to Washington D.C. and said he wanted to write a book about the displaced people of the Dust Bowl. He was referred to Tom Collins, who ran the Weedpatch camp in Arvin, California. Steinbeck bought a red convertible and he and Carol drove from Washington D.C. to California.

He later claimed that, on that trip, the couple traced the route of the Joads but this part of his lore has been debunked. In any case, he was able to pick up many details along long stretches of Route 66 that they did travel. And those help make the book one of the greatest American stories of the road that has ever been written. In The Grapes of Wrath the displacement of a people starts with handbills, distributed among the farmers of the Dust Bowl, offering picking jobs in California. Before long, cars “crawled out of the side roads onto the great cross-country highway, and then took the migrant way to the West. In the daylight they scuttled like bugs to the westward; and as the dark caught them they clustered like bugs near to shelter and to water.” 9 Thus did the Joad family, from grandparents on down to children, set out from Oklahoma on an overloaded automobile, with a former preacher named Jim Casy. Almost exactly half of the book depicts the journey westward. Steinbeck describes with knowing accuracy the side-of-thehighway establishments, the increasingly foreboding geography, and how to change a cam shaft without the proper tools because one has to.

“It don’t take no nerve to do somepin when there ain’t nothing else you can do,” Tom Joad tells a service-station boy. And that pretty much sums up many portraits of the numbed migrants—not only Steinbeck’s—that appeared in the 1930’s. Before they even reach California, the Joads find out that thousands of handbills had been distributed for 300 open jobs. But it is too late to turn back, and there is nothing to turn back to. Furthermore, even after all of the disappointments of the Joads’ journey across the country, and despite the fact that they are almost turned away at the border, the “promised land” of California still possesses abundant power to move them: They drove through Tehachapi in the morning glow, and the sun came up behind them, and then—suddenly they saw the great valley below them. Al jammed on the brake and stopped in the middle of the road, and, “Jesus Christ! Look!” he said.

The vineyards, the orchards, the great flat valley, green and beautiful, the trees set in rows, and the farm houses… Ruthie and Winfield scrambled down from the car, and then they stood, silent and awestruck, embarrassed before the great valley. The distance was thinned by haze, and the land grew softer and softer in the distance. A windmill flashed in the sun and its turning blades were like a little heliograph, far away. Ruthie and Winfield looked at it, and Ruthie whispered, “It’s California.” Winfield moved his lips silently over the syllables. “There’s fruit,” he said aloud. 10 The exodus became, for Steinbeck, a living laboratory for the concept of the superorganism and its eventual triumph. The Joads have the good fortune of ending up at a camp like Weedpatch, where the residents govern themselves, and work together, and are able to hold up their heads. Tom Collins helped Steinbeck write about the camp. He himself seemed to have the mind of a writer, or perhaps a scientist, for he kept many notes about the customs, diction, and situations of the camp residents who were in his care.

Throughout The Grapes of Wrath, most of the people from the local towns are portrayed as hostile: evidence, Steinbeck seems to be suggesting, of the small-town bourgeoisie trying to maintain their status quo. This is a version of the facts that the California state historian Kevin Starr later questioned, citing the fact that the counties that most felt the bulge in migrants made substantial efforts to accommodate them, raising their taxes and increasing spending on social workers, teachers and nurses. Starr also added that not a single one of the handbills Steinbeck mentioned has ever surfaced, suggesting that it was a point where fiction trumped reality for the author. Ironically, writing about so much poverty made Steinbeck a rich man—one of those strange dissonances of his success that he had a hard time overcoming. The book was initially banned from some libraries as “obscene,” but since it appeared it has taught countless thousands of high school students what life was like during the Great Depression. The Grapes of Wrath was made into a movie in 1940, directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda, and parts of the movie were actually filmed at Weedpatch (some of whose buildings survive in Arvin to this day).

The Native Son Leaves California In 1941, Steinbeck left California, and Carol, accompanied by a young songstress named Gwen Conger whom he had wooed in Los Angeles. With her by his side he returned to New York City, certainly a different figure from the man child who had labored on Madison Square Garden. The new Mrs. Steinbeck gave birth to a son in 1943. A year later, Steinbeck and his family came back to California, with intentions to stay. He bought a property he had coveted since he was a child: the historic Lara Soto Adobe house in Monterey, a long, low building with a massive cypress tree out front. Soon after they moved in, Steinbeck’s latest work, called Cannery Row, came out. “Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light…a nostalgia, a dream,” it began.

And from this opening line there unfolded the story of the charismatic but somewhat lonely scientist named “Doc”—unmistakably Ed Ricketts—and the down-ontheir- luck men and prostitutes with whom he consorts down near the man-made canyons between the huge sardine packing companies along the waterfront. The book was poorly received by critics and Monterey residents. All of a sudden, in the little city, people would cross the street when they saw the well-known coming. 11 It was the stink, the grating noise, the prostitutes and homeless men that got to the residents. They seemingly failed to appreciate the poetry or the nostalgia. Steinbeck attributed the reaction of his fellow citizens to resentment of his success. And in a despondent mood, he wrote to his editor that California “isn’t my country anymore. And it won’t be until I am dead. It makes me very sad.” 12 He made good on his words and left the state forever. He lost his friend Ed Ricketts soon afterward, when the doctor/philosopher’s car was struck by a train, the Del Monte Express, in 1948. Following that tragic event, there was even less reason to return.

Steinbeck never lived in California again. In 1960, Steinbeck set out on the road again in a speciallyequipped van, leaving behind his third wife, Elaine, but bringing with him his poodle, Charley. “Once I traveled around in an old bakery wagon,” he reminisced, a “double-doored rattler with a mattress on its floor. I stopped where people stopped or gathered, I listened and looked and felt, and in the process had a picture of my country the accuracy of which was impaired only by my own shortcomings. So it was that I determined to look again, to try to rediscover this monster land.” 13 Steinbeck traveled over 10,000 miles and revisited, as part of his grand itinerary, the California he had left behind. Travels with Charley was published in 1962 and it has become part of the canon of American road books. But though he had many pleasant encounters, and experienced the kindness of strangers, the 60-year-old Steinbeck did not rediscover the country in the same profound way that he had the first time as a young man. Neither was the country the same.

“When we get these thruways across the whole country,” he observed presciently, “as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.” 14 By that time, the interstate system had already siphoned off much of the business from Route 66 which he, like no other, had put on the literary map. Today the sterility of interstate rest areas and service exits is exceeded only by their convenience. On a busy day they still exude the hum of Americans on the move. It is the roads that have changed, and the vehicles, more than the people. To view the remaining text of this chapter, please subscribe to our Excerpts & Images newsletter. 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." John Steinbeck John Steinbeck Location of death: Sag Harbor, NY Cause of death: Heart Failure Remains: Buried, Garden of Memories Cemetery, Salinas, CA Gender: Male Nationality: United States Executive summary: The Grapes of Wrath American author John Steinbeck wrote moving tales of ordinary, working class Americans, works which resonated during the Great Depression, and have remained popular and pertinent over subsequent decades. His own upbringing was basically middle-class � his father was an accountant who rose to become treasurer of Monterey County, California � but his primary literary inspiration came from Sir Thomas Malory 's telling of the legend of King Arthur. He worked as a ranch-hand and lab assistant to earn his tuition to Stanford, then attended the college intermittently, only taking the classes that interested him (mostly English and marine biology) and never earning a degree. After quitting college in 1925, he worked as a deckhand and construction laborer, surveyor and fruit-picker while writing his first few novels.

His first novel, Cup of Gold (1929), centered on the life and romance of the pirate Henry Morgan , but like his next few efforts it was received indifferently. His fourth novel, 1935's Tortilla Flat, became a best-seller, telling a rather whimsical, humorous tale about unemployed Mexican-Americans in California, obliquely inspired by King Arthur's adventures. With his 1936 novel In Dubious Battle, focused on a strike of migratory fruit pickers on California farms, Steinbeck entered the genre of politically-charged "working stiff" fiction that became his trademark. Of Mice and Men (1937), arguably Steinbeck's most beloved work, tells the poignant story of two migrant field workers, mismatched in stature and intellect but the best of friends. His most famous work, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), was drawn from Steinbeck's extended visits to California migrant camps at the height of the Depression, and chronicles the heartbreaking exodus of homeless Oklahomans who come to California in a desperate search for work.

Grapes of Wrath was adapted into a classic John Ford film starring Henry Fonda , with most of the novel's dark, stark imagery intact, but with a more optimistic Hollywood ending in place of the book's bleak finish. Steinbeck's other well-known novels include Cannery Row (1945), which deals with attempts to repair a fractured friendship among workers and shopkeepers in a California cannery town, and East of Eden (1952), a sprawling but intriguing soap opera of blackmail and murder, inspired the Biblical sibling rivalry of Cain and Abel. His lesser-known but still excellent writings include The Wayward Bus (1947), a compact, intense tale of passengers stranded at a gas station, and Travels with Charley (1962), a non-fiction work which chronicles Steinbeck's journey across America with his pet poodle. He also wrote the original story for Alfred Hitchcock 's Lifeboat, and the screenplay for Elia Kazan 's Viva Zapata!, a film biography of Emiliano Zapata starring Marlon Brando .

Steinbeck won a Pulitzer Prize in 1940 for The Grapes of Wrath, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. His third wife, Elaine Anderson Scott, was the ex-wife of actor Zachary Scott . Father: John Ernst Steinbeck (Monterey County Treasurer, b. 1862, d. 1935) Mother: Olive Hamilton Steinbeck (teacher, b. 1867, d. 1934) Sister: Elizabeth Ann Steinbeck Ainsworth (b. 25-May-1894, d. 20-Oct-1992) Sister: Mary Steinbeck Dekker (b. 9-Jan-1905, d. 23-Jan-1965) Wife: Carol Henning (secretary, m. 14-Jan-1930, div. 1932) Wife: Gwyndolyn Conger (singer, m. 29-Mar-1943, div. Aug-1948) Son: Thomas (author, b. 2-Aug-1944) Son: John IV (writer, b.

12-Jun-1946, d. 7-Feb-1991) Wife: Elaine Anderson Scott (oil heiress, m.

28-Dec-1950, until his death) Cup of Gold (1929, novel) The Pastures of Heaven (1932, short stories) To a God Unknown (1933, novel) Tortilla Flat (1935, novel) In Dubious Battle (1936, novel) Of Mice and Men (1937, novel) The Red Pony (1937, novella) The Long Valley (1938, short stories) The Grapes of Wrath (1939, novel) Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research (1941, travelogue) Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team (1942, nonfiction) The Moon Is Down (1942, novel) Cannery Row (1945, novel) The Wayward Bus (1947, novel) A Russian Journal (1948, travelogue) Burning Bright (1950, novel) East of Eden (1952, novel) Sweet Thursday (1954, novel) The Short Reign of Pippin IV (1957

, novel) Once There Was a War (1958, collection) The Winter of Our Discontent (1961, novel) Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962, travelogue) America and Americans (1966, essays) Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969, letters) Steinbeck: A Life in Letters (1975, letters) The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976, novel) Wrote plays: Of Mice and Men (1937, based on Steinbeck's novel ) The Moon is Down (1944, based on Steinbeck's novel ) Burning Bright (1956, based on Steinbeck's novel ) Appears on postage stamps: John Steinbeck Facts for Kids | KidzSearch.com 4 Other websites Early life Steinbeck was born to John Ernst Steinbeck Sr., a first-generation German American .

He attended Stanford University until 1925 when he left the university in order to become a writer. His first work, Cup of Gold, came out four years later, but was not successful. He married Carol Henning the following year. Steinbeck first gained success with the novel Tortilla Flat in 1935 . The story was about two men living in Monterey, California during the Great Depression . The book won the California Commonwealth Club's Gold Medal. It was made into a movie seven years later, starring Spencer Tracy, Hedy Lamarr, and John Garfield. Critical success Steinbeck continued to write on the subject of the Great Depression. Two years later, Steinbeck wrote Of Mice and Men, considered as one of the best works of American literature in the twentieth century. His story dealt with the lives of two migrant laborers with big dreams in California . It was turned into a Hollywood movie in 1939 , starring Lon Chaney Jr. as "Lennie" and Burgess Meredith as "George". That year, Steinbeck followed up with another book, The Grapes of Wrath. The book is about the Joad family and their travels from Oklahoma to California during the Dust Bowl in search of work.

The novel won the Pulitzer Prize and movie adaptation won two Academy Awards, and is ranked #7 on the American Film Institute's list, 100 Years...100 Cheers: America's Most Inspiring Movies. There was controversy with the book, though. Many people felt that Steinbeck's liberal opinions misrepresented the truth of Dust Bowl migrations. He had this student that his name was Oscar Perez and they would both do the job together. Later life Steinbeck continued to write from 1940s to 1960s. He wrote such works as The Moon is Down, The Pearl, Cannery Row, East of Eden and The Winter of Our Discontent. In 1962, Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in Literature for "his realistic and imaginative writing, combining as it does sympathetic humor and keen social perception." Two years later, he was awarded the United States Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson . Steinbeck died on December 20 , 1968 in New York at the age of 66, of a heart disease .

Other websites John Steinbeck Biography - life, family, children, story, school, mother, son, book, information, born, house John Steinbeck Biography New York, New York American writer John Steinbeck, American author and winner of the Nobel Prize in 1962, was a leading writer of novels about the working class and was a major spokesman for the victims of the Great Depression (a downturn in the American system of producing, distributing, and using goods and services in the 1930s, and during which time millions of people lost their jobs). Early life John Ernst Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California, the only son of John Ernst Steinbeck Sr. and Olive Hamilton. His father was a bookkeeper and accountant who served for many years as the treasurer of Monterey County, California. Steinbeck received his love of literature from his mother, who was interested in the arts. His favorite book, and a main influence on his writing, was Sir Thomas Malory's (c. 1408–1471) Le Morte d'Arthur, a collection of the legends of King Arthur.

Steinbeck decided while in high school that he wanted to be a writer. He also enjoyed playing sports and worked during the summer on various ranches. Steinbeck worked as a laboratory assistant and farm laborer to support himself through six years of study at Stanford University, where he took only those courses that interested him without seeking a degree. In 1925 he traveled to New York (by way of the Panama Canal) on a freighter (boat that carries inventory). After arriving in New York, he worked as a reporter and as part of a construction crew building Madison Square Garden. During this time he was also collecting impressions for his first novel. Cup of Gold (1929) was an unsuccessful attempt at romance involving the pirate Henry Morgan. Begins writing seriously Undiscouraged, Steinbeck returned to California to begin work as a writer of serious fiction. A collection of short stories, The Pastures of Heaven (1932), contained vivid descriptions of rural (farm) life among the "unfinished children of nature" in his native California valley. His second novel, To a God Unknown (1933), was his strongest statement about man's relationship to the land.

With Tortilla Flat (1935) Steinbeck received critical and popular success; there are many critics who consider it his most artistically satisfying work. John Steinbeck. Steinbeck next dealt with the problems of labor unions in In Dubious Battle (1936), an effective story of a strike (when workers all decide to stop working as a form of protest against unfair treatment) by local grape pickers. Of Mice and Men (1937), first conceived as a play, is a tightly constructed novella (short novel) about an unusual friendship between two migrant workers (laborers who travel to wherever there is available work, usually on farms). Although the book is powerfully written and often moving, some critics feel that it lacks a moral vision. Steinbeck's series of articles for the San Francisco Chronicle on the problems of migrant farm laborers provided material for The Grapes of Wrath (1939), his major novel and the finest working-class novel of the 1930s. The Grapes of Wrath relates the struggle of a family of Oklahoma tenant farmers forced to turn over their land to the banks.

The family then journeys across the vast plains to the promised land of California—only to be met with scorn when they arrive. It is a successful example of social protest in fiction, as well as a convincing tribute to man's will to survive. The Grapes of Wrath received the Pulitzer Prize in 1940. Other subjects During World War II (1939–45), which the United States entered to help other nations battle Germany, Italy, and Japan, Steinbeck served as a foreign correspondent. From this experience came such nonfiction as Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team (1942); Once There Was a War (1958), a collection of Steinbeck's dispatches from 1943; and A Russian Journal (1948), with photographs by Robert Capa. More interesting nonfiction of this period is The Sea of Cortez, coauthored with scientist Edward F. Ricketts. This account of the two explorers' research into sea life provides an important key to many of the themes and attitudes featured in Steinbeck's novels.

Steinbeck's fiction during the 1940s includes The Moon Is Down (1942), a tale of the Norwegian resistance to occupation by the Nazis (German ruling party that scorned democracy and considered all non-German people, especially Jews, inferior); Cannery Row (1944), a return to the setting of Tortilla Flat; The Wayward Bus (1947); and The Pearl, a popular novella about a poor Mexican fisherman who discovers a valuable pearl that brings bad luck to his family. Later decline In the 1950s Steinbeck's artistic decline was evident with a series of novels that were overly sentimental, stuffy, and lacking in substance. The author received modest critical praise in 1961 for his more ambitious novel The Winter of Our Discontent, a study of the moral disintegration (falling apart) of a man of high ideals. In 1962 Travels with Charley, a pleasantly humorous account of his travels through America with his pet poodle, was well received. Following the popular success of the latter work, Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Steinbeck's work remains popular in both the United States and Europe, chiefly for its social consciousness and concern and for the narrative qualities displayed in the early novels. Although he refused to settle into political conservatism (preferring to maintain traditions and resist change) in his later years, his all-embracing support of American values and acceptance of all national policies, including the Vietnam War (1955–75; conflict in which the United States fought against Communist North Vietnam when they invaded Democratic South Vietnam), lost him the respect of many liberal (preferring social change) intellectuals who had once admired his social commitments. He died on December 20, 1968, in New York City. For More Information

Question: American author John Steinbeck was born in which US state?
Answer: California