John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr.

(February 27, 1902 – December

20, 1968) was an American writer. He is widely known
for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath
(1939) and East of Eden (1952) and the novella Of Mice
and Men (1937). He was an author of twenty-seven
books, including sixteen novels, six non-fiction books and
five collections of short stories; Steinbeck received the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.
His father, John Ernst Steinbeck, served as Monterey
County treasurer. John's mother, Olive Hamilton, a former school teacher,
shared Steinbeck's passion of reading and writing. Steinbeck lived in a small
rural town that was essentially a frontier settlement, set amid some of the
world's most fertile land. He spent his summers working on nearby ranches
and later with migrant workers on Spreckels ranch. He became aware of the
harsher aspects of migrant life and the darker side of human nature, which
material expressed in such works as Of Mice and Men. He also explored his
surroundings, walking across local forests, fields, and farms.
In 1919, Steinbeck graduated from Salinas High School and attended Stanford
University intermittently until 1925, eventually leaving without a degree. He
traveled to New York City and held odd jobs while pursuing his dream of
becoming a writer. When he failed to get his work published, he returned to
California and worked for a time in 1928 as a tour guide and caretaker at the
fish hatchery in Tahoe City, where he would meet tourist Carol Henning, his
future first wife. Steinbeck and Henning were married in January 1930.

For most of the Great Depression and his marriage to Carol, Steinbeck lived in
a cottage that was owned by his father in Pacific Grove, California, on the
Monterey Peninsula a few blocks from the border of the city of Monterey,
California. The elder Steinbeck supplied him with the lodging for free, with
paper for his manuscripts, and critical loans beginning at the end of 1928
which allowed Steinbeck to give up a punishing warehouse job in San
Francisco, and focus on his craft.

After the publication of his Monterey novel Tortilla Flat in 1935, his first clear
novelistic success, the Steinbecks emerged from relative poverty and built a
summer ranch-home in Los Gatos. In 1940, Steinbeck went on a voyage
around the Gulf of California with his influential friend Ed Ricketts, to collect
biological specimens. The Log from the Sea of Cortez describes his
experiences. Although Carol accompanied Steinbeck on the trip, their
marriage was beginning to suffer by this time, and would effectively end in
1941, even as Steinbeck worked on the manuscript for the book.

John Steinbeck died in New York City on December 20, 1968 of heart disease
and congestive heart failure. He was 66, and had been a life-long smoker. An
autopsy showed nearly complete occlusion of the main coronary arteries.

In accordance with his wishes, his body was cremated, and an urn containing
his ashes was eventually interred (March 4, 1969) at the Hamilton family
gravesite at Garden of Memories Memorial Park in Salinas, with those of his
parents and maternal grandparents. His third wife, Elaine, was buried in the
plot in 2004. He had earlier written to his doctor that he felt deeply "in his
flesh" that he would not survive his physical death, and that the biological
end of his life was the final end to it.

Tortilla Flat

“Tortilla Flat” tells the story of Danny and his friends, a bunch of Monterey
“paisanos”, following their mischiefs over a period of a few months. The
paisanos are basically jobless bums of mixed Spanish-Indian descent, who
spend their days either stealing food or working in odd one-time jobs, and
their nights drinking wine, singing and fighting.

They live in old wooden houses set in weedy yards, and the pine trees from
the forest are about the houses. The paisanos are clean of commercialism,
free of the complicated systems of American business, and, having nothing
that can be stolen, exploited or mortgaged, that system has not attacked
them very vigorously.

What is a paisano? He is a mixture of Spanish, Indian, Mexican and assorted

Caucasian bloods. His ancestors have lived in California for a hundred or two
years. He speaks English with a paisano accent and Spanish with a paisano
accent. When questioned concerning his race, he indignantly claims pure
Spanish blood and rolls up his sleeve to show that the soft inside of his arm is
nearly white. His color, like that of a well-browned meerschaum pipe, he
ascribes to sunburn. He is a paisano, and he lives in that uphill district above
the town of Monterey called Tortilla Flat, although it isn’t a flat at all.
Steinbeck gets into the soul of a paisano extremely well, and conveys it
masterfully to the reader. The book is actually a loosely coupled collection of
short stories, each highlighting a different aspect of the bunch’s way of life
and characters. I just can’t stop being amazed by this author, his command of
the language and ability to set you into the background of some period and
group of people, to make you feel like you’re actually experiencing the
scenes.

Edwin Arlington Robinson was born in the village of Head

Tide in the town of Alna, Maine, on December 22, 1869.

Born and raised in a wealthy family, he was the youngest

of three sons and not groomed to take over the family
business. Instead, he pursued poetry since childhood,
joining the local poetry society as its youngest member.
He attended Harvard, but his personal life was soon beset
by a chain of tragedies that are reflected in his work. His father died, the
family went bankrupt, one of his brothers became a morphine addict, and his
mother contracted and eventually died from black diphtheria. Because of the
highly infectious nature of the disease, the local mortician was unwilling to
even tend to the body, forcing Robinson and his brothers to bury her
themselves. Shortly after, he met a woman, Emma Shepherd, with whom he
fell deeply in love, but he was also convinced that marriage and familial
responsibilities would hinder his work as a poet, so he introduced her to his
eldest brother, who married her. Though this brother agreed to support
Robinson (and did provide a modest monthly stipend for as long as he could
with his bankrupt business), the relationship between the poet and his
brother's wife was a source of tension between them. Later, his middle
brother died, apparently a suicide.

For several years, Robinson lived in poverty, continuing to write and publish
with the help of his friends. His first break came in 1905, when President
Teddy Roosevelt read one of Robinson's early works, Children of the Night.
He was so impressed by it that he arranged a job for Robinson at a custom
house, so that he could continue writing. Unfortunately, this was the least
fecund period in his creative career, and when he lost the president's
patronage after Roosevelt term of office ended, his employers cracked down
on Robinson until he eventually quit.
Soon after, he wrote The Town down the River, which was critically
acclaimed. In 1911, he found a patroness in the person of the widow of
composer Edward MacDowell and worked to improve his poetry even
further. He also attempted writing plays, but these were not well-received.
Another, anonymous patron, who began supporting him in 1916 ensured
that Robinson was financially self-sufficient. He began work on an Arthurian
trilogy, Merlin, Lancelot, and Tristram.

In 1922, Robinson received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected
Poems: He won it again in 1925 for The Man Who Died Twice and in 1928 for
Tristram, the third part of his trilogy. With his new-found fame and fortune,
he made a radical change in his lifestyle too, tending to himself and even
starting to drink again, claiming that he was doing it to protest Prohibition.
He published regularly until the day he died, in New York City in 1935.

A song based on Robinson's poem "Richard Cory" was recorded by Simon and
Garfunkel on their second album, Sounds of Silence.

Richard Cory

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean-favoured and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,

And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good Morning!" and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich, yes, richer than a king,

And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine -- we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked and waited for the light,
And went without the meat and cursed the bread,
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet in his head.

Walter "Walt" Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26,

1892) was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A
humanist, he was a part of the transition between
transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both
views in his works. Whitman is among the most
influential poets in the American canon, often called
the father of free verse. His work was very
controversial in its time, particularly his poetry
collection Leaves of Grass, which was described as
obscene for its overt sexuality.

Born on Long Island, Whitman worked as a journalist, a teacher, a

government clerk, and–in addition to publishing his poetry–was a volunteer
nurse during the American Civil War. Early in his career, he also produced a
temperance novel, Franklin Evans (1842). Whitman's major work, Leaves of
Grass, was first published in 1855 with his own money. The work was an
attempt at reaching out to the common person with an American epic. He
continued expanding and revising it until his death in 1892. After a stroke
towards the end of his life, he moved to Camden, New Jersey, where his
health further declined. He died at age 72 and his funeral became a public
spectacle.

Whitman's sexuality is often discussed alongside his poetry. Though

biographers continue to debate his sexuality, he is usually described as either
homosexual or bisexual in his feelings and attractions. However, there is
disagreement among biographers as to whether Whitman had actual sexual
experiences with men. Whitman was concerned with politics throughout his
life. He supported the Wilmot Proviso and opposed the extension of slavery
generally. His poetry presented an egalitarian view of the races, and at one
point he called for the abolition of slavery, but later he saw the abolitionist
movement as a threat to democracy.

His poetry depicts love and sexuality in a more earthy, individualistic way
common in American culture before the medicalization of sexuality in the
late 19th century. Though Leaves of Grass was often labeled pornographic or
obscene, only one critic remarked on its author's presumed sexual activity: in
a November 1855 review, Rufus Wilmot Griswold suggested Whitman was
guilty of "that horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians". Whitman
had intense friendships with many men and boys throughout his life. Some
biographers have claimed that he may not have actually engaged in sexual
relationships with males, while others cite letters, journal entries and other
sources which they claim as proof of the sexual nature of some of his
relationships. "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" is a lyric poem with a
single stanza of eight lines. 

When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer

When I heard the learn'd astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and
measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much
applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

ASSIGNMENT(S): FOR THE NEXT CLASS

1. Read the pamphlet about John Steinbeck, Edwin A. Robinson and Walt
Whitman’s biography and their works then write their minibiography
told by yourself.
2. Study for next quiz based on Edgar A. Poe and his poem The Bells to
explain how it produces rhetoric functions in a poem.
3. Underline and explain in which parts of the poem Mending Wall by
Robert Frost dynamism is shown. (Group Work)