John Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck Jr. (/ˈstaɪnbɛk/; February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) was an American author and the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature winner “for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception.”[2] He has been called “a giant of American letters.”[3][4]
During his writing career, he authored 33 books, with one book coauthored alongside Edward Ricketts, including 16 novels, six non-fiction books, and two collections of short stories. He is widely known for the comic novels Tortilla Flat (1935) and Cannery Row (1945), the multi-generation epic East of Eden (1952), and the novellas The Red Pony (1933) and Of Mice and Men (1937). The Pulitzer Prize-winning The Grapes of Wrath (1939)[5] is considered Steinbeck’s masterpiece and part of the American literary canon.[6] In the first 75 years after it was published, it sold 14 million copies.[7]
Most of Steinbeck’s work is set in central California, particularly in the Salinas Valley and the California Coast Ranges region. His works frequently explored the themes of fate and injustice, especially as applied to downtrodden or everyman protagonists.
Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California.[8] He was of German, English, and Irish descent.[9] Johann Adolf Großsteinbeck (1828–1913), Steinbeck’s paternal grandfather, was a founder of Mount Hope, a short-lived messianic farming colony in Palestine that disbanded after Arab attackers killed his brother and raped his brother’s wife and mother-in-law. He arrived in the United States in 1858, shortening the family name to Steinbeck. The family farm in Heiligenhaus, Mettmann, Germany, is still named “Großsteinbeck”.
His father, John Ernst Steinbeck (1862–1935), served as Monterey County treasurer. John’s mother, Olive Hamilton (1867–1934), a former school teacher, shared Steinbeck’s passion for reading and writing.[10] The Steinbecks were members of the Episcopal Church,[11] although Steinbeck later became agnostic.[12] Steinbeck lived in a small rural valley (no more than a frontier settlement) set in some of the world’s most fertile soil, about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast. Both valley and coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction.[13] He spent his summers working on nearby ranches and later with migrant workers on Spreckels sugar beet farms. There he learned of the harsher aspects of the migrant life and the darker side of human nature, which supplied him with material expressed in Of Mice and Men. He explored his surroundings, walking across local forests, fields, and farms.[14] While working at Spreckels Sugar Company, he sometimes worked in their laboratory, which gave him time to write. He had considerable mechanical aptitude and fondness for repairing things he owned.[15]
The Steinbeck House at 132 Central Avenue, Salinas, California, the Victorian home where Steinbeck spent his childhood.
Steinbeck graduated from Salinas High School in 1919 and went on to study English literature at Stanford University near Palo Alto, leaving without a degree in 1925. He traveled to New York City where he took odd jobs while trying to write. When he failed to publish his work, he returned to California and worked in 1928 as a tour guide and caretaker[15] at Lake Tahoe, where he met Carol Henning, his first wife.[10][15][16] They married in January 1930 in Los Angeles, where, with friends, he attempted to make money by manufacturing plaster mannequins.[15]
