JOHN STEINBECK
G'day folks,
Welcome to a post on the great John Steinbeck.
Born February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California, John
Steinbeck dropped out of college and worked as a manual laborer before
achieving success as a writer. His novel The Grapes of Wrath—about the
migration of a family from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to California—won a Pulitzer
Prize and a National Book Award. Steinbeck served as a war correspondent during
World War II. He died in 1968.
American
novelist John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas,
California. His books, including his landmark work The Grapes of Wrath,
often dealt with social and economic issues. He was raised with modest means.
His father, John Ernst Steinbeck, tried his hand at several different jobs to
keep his family fed: He owned a feed-and-grain store, managed a flour plant and
was the treasurer of Monterrey County. His mother, Olive Hamilton Steinbeck,
was a former schoolteacher.
For the
most part Steinbeck, who grew up with three sisters, had a happy childhood. He
was shy but smart and early in his life formed an appreciation for the land,
and in particular California's Salinas Valley, which would greatly inform his
later writing. According to accounts, Steinbeck made the decision at the age of
14 to become a writer and often locked himself in his bedroom to write poems
and stories. In 1919 Steinbeck enrolled at Stanford University. But Steinbeck
seems to have had little use for college.
He viewed
himself strictly as a writer, and his decision to go to Stanford was made more
to please his parents than anything else. Over the next six years Steinbeck
drifted in out of school, eventually dropping out for good in 1925 without a
degree.
Following
Stanford, Steinbeck tried to make a go of it as a freelance writer. He briefly
moved to New York City, where he found work as a construction worker and
newspaper reporter, but then scurried back to California, where he took a job
as a caretaker in Lake Tahoe. It was during this time that he wrote his first
novel, Cup of Gold (1929), as well as met and married his first wife,
Carol. Over the next decade, with Carol's support and paycheck, Steinbeck
continued to pour himself into his writing.
His
follow-up novels, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown
(1933), received tepid reviews. It wasn't until Tortilla Flat (1935), a
humorous novel about paisano life in the Monterrey region, that the writer
achieved real success. Steinbeck struck a more serious tone with In Dubious
Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Long Valley
(1938), a collection of short stories.
What is
widely considered his finest, most ambitious novel, The Grapes of Wrath,
was published in 1939. The book, about a dispossessed Oklahoma family and its
struggle to carve out a new life in California at the height of the Depression,
captured the mood and angst of the nation during this time period. At the
height of its popularity, The Grapes of Wrath sold 10,000 copies a week.
It eventually earned Steinbeck a Pulitzer Prize in 1940.
In the last 25 years of his
life Steinbeck wrote books including Cannery Row (1945), Burning
Bright (1950), East of Eden
(1952), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961) and Travels with Charley:
In Search of America (1962). In 1962, Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize
for Literature. He died of heart disease on December 20, 1968, in his New York
City home.
Clancy's comment: What can I say?
I'm ...
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