Author John Steinbeck was born February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California.

He was of German, English, and Irish

descent. He dropped out of college and worked as a manual laborer before achieving success as a writer. His novel
"The Grapes of Wrath"—about the migration of a family from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to California—won a Pulitzer
Prize and a National Book Award. Steinbeck served as a war correspondent during World War II. He died in 1968.

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). As the 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.

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. 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. 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 supplied him with material expressed in
such works as Of Mice and Men.

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. For most of the Great Depression and during his marriage to Carol, Steinbeck
lived in a cottage owned by his father in Pacific Grove, California, on the Monterey Peninsula a few blocks from the
border of the city of Monterey, California. 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 (хладен, равнодушен, безразличен) reviews. It wasn't until Tortilla Flat (1935), a
humorous novel about paisano (A peasant of Spanish or Italian ethnic origin) 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 struggle
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
May 1948 Steinbeck traveled to California on an emergency trip to be with his friend Ed Ricketts, who had been
seriously injured when his car was struck by a train. Ricketts died hours before Steinbeck arrived. On returning home
from this devastating trip, Steinbeck was confronted by Gwyn (his second wife), who told him she wanted a divorce for
various reasons related to estrangement. She could not be dissuaded, and the divorce became final in August. Steinbeck
spent the year after Ricketts' death in deep depression, by his own account.

1
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.

Ed Ricketts

In the 1930s and 1940s, Ed Ricketts strongly influenced Steinbeck's writing. Steinbeck frequently took small trips with
Ricketts along the California coast to give Steinbeck time off from his writing and to collect biological specimens,
which Ricketts sold for a living. Their joint book about a collecting expedition to the Gulf of California in 1940, which
was part travelogue and part natural history, published just as the U.S. entered World War II, never found an audience
and did not sell well. However, in 1951, Steinbeck republished the narrative portion of the book as The Log from the
Sea of Cortez, under his name only (though Ricketts had written some of it). This work remains in print today.

Ricketts was Steinbeck's model for the character of "Doc" in Cannery Row (1945) and Sweet Thursday (1954), "Friend
Ed" in Burning Bright, and characters in In Dubious Battle (1936) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Ecological themes
recur in Steinbeck's novels of the period.

Steinbeck's close relations with Ricketts ended in 1941 when Steinbeck moved away from Pacific Grove and divorced
from his wife Carol. Ricketts' biographer Eric Enno Tamm notes that, except for East of Eden (1952), Steinbeck's
writing declined after Ricketts' untimely death in 1948.

World War II

His novel The Moon Is Down (1942), about the Socrates-inspired spirit of resistance in an occupied village in Northern
Europe, was made into a film almost immediately. It was presumed that the unnamed country of the novel was Norway
and the occupiers the Nazis, and in 1945 Steinbeck received the Haakon VII Cross of freedom for his literary
contributions to the Norwegian resistance movement.

In 1943, Steinbeck served as a World War II war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune and worked with the
Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the CIA). It was at that time he became friends with Will Lang, Jr. of
Time/Life magazine. During the war, Steinbeck accompanied the commando raids of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.'s Beach
Jumpers program, which launched small-unit diversion operations against German-held islands in the Mediterranean.
Some of his writings from this period were incorporated in the documentary Once There Was a War (1958).

Steinbeck returned from the war with a number of wounds from shrapnel and some psychological trauma. He treated
himself, as ever, by writing. He wrote Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944). He later requested that his name be removed
from the credits of Lifeboat because he believed the final version of the film had racist undertones. In 1944, suffering
from homesickness for his Pacific Grove/Monterey life of the 1930s, he also wrote Cannery Row (1945) which became
so famous that Ocean View Avenue in Monterey, the location of the book, was eventually renamed Cannery Row in
1958.

After the end of the war, he wrote The Pearl (1947). The novel is an imaginative telling of a story which Steinbeck
had heard in La Paz in 1940, as related in The Log From the Sea of Cortez, which he described in Chapter 11 as being
"so much like a parable that it almost can't be". Steinbeck traveled to Mexico for the filming with Wagner who helped
with the script; on this trip he would be inspired by the story of Emiliano Zapata, and subsequently wrote a film script
(Viva Zapata!) directed by Elia Kazan and starring Marlon Brando and Anthony Quinn.

Literary influences

Steinbeck grew up in California's Salinas Valley, a culturally diverse place with a rich migratory and immigrant
history. This upbringing imparted a regionalistic flavor to his writing, giving many of his works a distinct sense of
place. Salinas, Monterey and parts of the San Joaquin Valley were the setting for many of his stories. The area is now
sometimes referred to as "Steinbeck Country". Most of his early work dealt with subjects familiar to him from his
formative years. An exception was his first novel, Cup of Gold, which concerns the pirate Henry Morgan, whose
adventures had captured Steinbeck's imagination as a child.

2
In his subsequent novels, Steinbeck found a more authentic voice by drawing upon direct memories of his life in
California. His childhood friend, Max Wagner, a brother of Jack Wagner and who later became a film actor, served as
inspiration for The Red Pony. Later he used real American historical conditions and events in the first half of the 20th
century, which he had experienced first-hand as a reporter. Steinbeck often populated his stories with struggling
characters; his works examined the lives of the working class and migrant workers during the Dust Bowl and the Great
Depression.

His later work reflected his wide range of interests, including marine biology, politics, religion, history and mythology.
One of his last published works was Travels with Charley, a travelogue of a road trip he took in 1960 to rediscover
America.

Government harassment

Steinbeck complained publicly about government harassment. Thomas Steinbeck, the author's eldest son, said that J.
Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI at the time, could find no basis for prosecuting Steinbeck and therefore used his
power to encourage the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to audit Steinbeck's taxes every single year of his life, just to
annoy him. According to Thomas, a true artist is one who "without a thought for self, stands up against the stones of
condemnation, and speaks for those who are given no real voice in the halls of justice, or the halls of government. By
doing so these people will naturally become the enemies of the political status quo."

In a 1942 letter to United States Attorney General Francis Biddle, he wrote: "Do you suppose you could ask Edgar's
boys to stop stepping on my heels? They think I am an enemy alien. It is getting tiresome." The FBI denied that
Steinbeck was under investigation.

Of Mice and Men

Of Mice and Men is a tragedy that was written in the form of a play in 1937. The story is about two traveling ranch
workers, George and Lennie, trying to work up enough money to buy their own farm/ranch. As it is set in 1930's
America, it provides an insight into The Great Depression, encompassing themes of racism, loneliness, prejudice
against the mentally ill, and the struggle for personal independence. Along with Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, and
The Pearl, Of Mice and Men is one of Steinbeck's best known works.

The Grapes of Wrath

The Grapes of Wrath is set in the Great Depression and describes a family of sharecroppers, the Joads, who were
driven from their land due to the dust storms of the Dust Bowl (The Dust Bowl, or the Dirty Thirties, was a period of
severe dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands in the
1930s, particularly in 1934 and 1936.). The title is a reference to the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Some critics found
it too sympathetic to the workers' plight and too critical of capitalism but it found quite a large audience in the working
class. It won both the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for fiction (novels) and was adapted as a film.

East of Eden

Steinbeck deals with the nature of good and evil in this Salinas Valley saga. The story follows two families: the
Hamiltons – based on Steinbeck's own maternal ancestry – and the Trasks, reprising stories about the Biblical Adam
and his progeny. The book was published in 1952. It was made into a movie in 1955.