John Steinbeck biography

Synopsis

Early Years

John Steinbeck was an American novelist whose books, including his landmark work, The Grapes of Wrath, often dealt with social and economic issues, was born February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California. 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.

Early Career

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 pore 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 struggled 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.

Later Life

Following that great success, Steinbeck served as a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune during World War II. He also traveled to Mexico to collect marine life with his friend Edward F. Ricketts, a marine biologist. Their collaboration resulted in the book Sea of Cortez (1941), which describes the marine life in the Gulf of California. 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.

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