John Steinbeck (1902 - 1968) was an American novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and war correspondent whose fiction is closely identified with the farms, canneries and migrant camps of central California. [1] His best-known works, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, portray poverty and displacement during the Great Depression. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. [2]
Early life and education
Steinbeck was born on 27 February 1902 in Salinas, California, in the agricultural valley that would supply the setting for much of his work. His father held county office and his mother was a former schoolteacher who encouraged his reading. He attended Salinas High School and then enrolled intermittently at Stanford University through the early 1920s, taking courses in English and marine biology but leaving without a degree. [1]
In the years that followed he supported himself with manual jobs on ranches, in road crews and at a fish hatchery, work that gave him direct knowledge of the labouring life he later wrote about. A period in New York City as a labourer and cub reporter ended in a return to California. [3]
Rise to prominence
His first novel, Cup of Gold, appeared in 1929 to little attention, and the books that followed sold poorly until Tortilla Flat in 1935. He then produced a sequence of works about agricultural labour and organised protest: In Dubious Battle (1936), the short novel Of Mice and Men (1937), which he also adapted for the stage, and The Grapes of Wrath (1939). [1]
The Grapes of Wrath follows the Joad family from the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma to the labour camps of California. It became a bestseller, won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel and a National Book Award, and was filmed by John Ford in 1940. It was also attacked as propaganda and banned or burned in several communities, including in Steinbeck's own county. [3]
Science, war and screenwriting
A close friendship with the marine biologist Ed Ricketts shaped Steinbeck's outlook and led to a joint specimen-collecting expedition to the Gulf of California, recorded in Sea of Cortez (1941). Ricketts also served as a model for characters in Cannery Row (1945). [1]
During the Second World War Steinbeck served as a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, reporting from Britain, North Africa and Italy. His novel The Moon Is Down, about a small country under occupation, circulated in clandestine translations in occupied Europe, and Norway later awarded him the King Haakon VII Freedom Cross. He also wrote for the screen, including work on the Alfred Hitchcock film Lifeboat and the screenplay for Viva Zapata!. [3]
Later work and legacy
His later books include East of Eden (1952), an ambitious family saga set in the Salinas Valley that he regarded as his most important work, The Winter of Our Discontent (1961) and the travel narrative Travels with Charley (1962), an account of a journey across the United States with his dog. [1]
He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962 for what the Swedish Academy called realistic and imaginative writing combining sympathetic humour with social perception. [2] President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. Steinbeck died of heart disease in New York City on 20 December 1968, and his ashes were buried in Salinas. His novels remain fixtures of American school curricula and among the most frequently read works of twentieth-century American fiction. [3]
