John Steinbeck

One of our great California writers

Early Days

• Steinbeck was born February 27 1902 in Salinas, which was and is in the heart of California’s agricultural industry and the area of the state where much of his literature takes place

• His father was a county controller and his mother a teacher

• At 14, he decided to become a writer and would often lock himself inside his room writing short stories

College and Early Adulthood

• Steinbeck attended Stanford to study Marine Biology, but didn’t finish and moved briefly to New York City to establish himself as a writer and a reporter. He was fired from his reporting job, and after finding little success as a writer, moved back to California

Early Writing

• As he worked numerous jobs, including being a caretaker in Lake Tahoe, he wrote his first novel, Cup of Gold, a novel about a Jamaican pirate, in 1929. This was also when and where he met and married his first wife, Carol, who helped to support him financially as he established himself as a writer. In all, Steinbeck was married three times in his life.

Successful Writing

• His first successful writing was Tortilla Flats, a humorous novel about life in the Monterey area of California (which is near Salinas), was published in 1935.

• His next popular novels, which was of a more serious tone, included, amongst others, Of Mice and Men, in 1937.

The Grapes of Wrath

• In 1939, Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath, the story of an Oklahoma family who moved to California and struggled to survive during The Great Depression. The book reflected the mood in the country at the time, and earned him the Pulitzer Prize, one of the two highest honors an author can achieve.

Middle Years

• Steinbeck worked as a war reported for the New York Herald Tribune during World War II.

• He traveled to Mexico with a friend, who was a marine biologist, to collect sea life. He used these experiences to write Sea of Cortez, which described sea life in the Gulf of California.

Controversy

• Steinbeck was an advocate for the underprivileged, which made him unpopular with many Americans, so the popularity of his novels in American waned, even though he remained extremely popular in Europe

Later Years

• In the last 25 years of his life, he wrote many great novels, such as Cannery Row in 1945, East of Eden in 1952, and Travels with Charlie in 1962

• In 1962, Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the other of the highest honors that a writer can achieve.

Death

• Steinbeck died of heart disease in New York City in 1968 at the age of 66.