John Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902 in Salinas, California, a farming community with of about 2500 people. He was the third of four children and the only son of John Ernst and Olive Hamiton Steinbeck. His sisters Beth and Esther were much older than John and he felt closest to Mary, the youngest. He spent his childhood and adolescence in the Salinas Valley, which he later called “the salad bowl of the nation. ” John’s mother, Olive, was the daughter of Irish immigrants. She left her parents’ ranch to become a teacher. John remembered his mother as energetic and full of fun.
He called his father, in contrast, “a singularly silent man. ” Steinbeck’s father, also named John, worked as the treasurer of Monterey County. He had chosen a safe, practical course in life, in order to support his family. John enjoyed literature from an early age on. His mother read him the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, Robert Louis Stevenson, and the stories of King Arthur. John attended Salinas High School, an experience he generally disliked, but one bright spot in his high school carrer was his ninth grade English teacher, Miss Cupp.
She admired the compositions he wrote and encouraged him to continue with his writing. Throughout high school, John spent most of his free time writing stories in his room. John graduated from HS in 1919 and then went to Stanford University. John wanted to study to be a writer, but his mother wanted him to be something practical, like a lawyer. While attending Stanford University, John Steinbeck decided that a degree was of no use to a writer. Instead, he studied the things that interested him and would help him progress as a writer. He studied literature, history, and classical Greek.
He convinced university officials to let him learn human anatomy alongside the medical students. Dissecting cadavers would help him “know more about people”, he explained. Steinbeck’s creative writing teacher taught him to write stories that were “true. ” She didn’t mean the events in the story had to have actually happened, but instead the story and characters must reflect real human feelings and conflicts. During his college years, Steinbeck worked at a number of different jobs to help pay for his education. He worked at a sugar company and for many different farmers.
He worked along side Mexican, Japanese, and Fililpino men, all the time gathering material for his writings. He would even pay people to hear their stories. By 1925, Steinbeck had decided he had spent enough time in school. Steinbeck traveled by freighter to New York City,as all good writers did. Steinbeck worked as a brick layer in the construction of Madison Square Garden. John worked as a reporter for the New York American. He got fired because he couldn’t or wouldn’t report facts as he found them–only the poetry or pilosophy he saw in them.
New York was a cold, frightening place to him and Steinbeck, deeply discouraged, returned to California. Steinbeck took a job as a caretaker at a vacation home near Lake Tahoe. He was alone most of the time and became indulged in his writings. He finished writing his first novel in 1928. The book, title “Cup of Gold,” was a historical tale of the pirate Henry Morgan. When the owners of the vacation home found that a pine tree had crashed through their roof, he lost his job–but go one the next day in a trout hatchery. One day a woman named Carol Henning toured the hatchery.
Immediately, John was attracted to her. He took her out on a date before she returned to her home in San Francisco. After being fired from his job, Steinbeck promptly moved to San Francisco to be with Carol. “Cup of Gold” was published in 1929. Steinbeck would send his books off to friends to have them type them and correct spelling and punctuation. “Why should I bother? ” Steinbeck asked. “There are millions of people who are good stenographers but there are’t so many thousands who can make as nice sounds as I can. ” For the first time in his life he was able to look ahead with financial comfort.
The following year, John and Carol were married and moved to Monterey, California. Near the Steinbecks home there was a sardine cannery, called Cannery Row. One of the fishermen who worked there became a good friend of Steinbeck’s. Ed Ricketts was interested in biology and like John, saw beauty in all forms of life. Steinbeck and Ricketts went on boating excursions. Steinbeck wrote of these experiences in “The Sea of Cortez. ” His next book, titled “The Pastures of Heaven” was published in 1931. In 1933 Steinbeck’s mother Olive had a massive stroke that left her paralyzed and disoriented.
John and Carol took care of her until she died later that year. Throughout this hard time, Steinbeck continued his writings. He completed “The Long Valley,” “The Red Pony,” and “Tortilla Flat. ” Somehow Steinbeck lost the original manuscript of “The Red Pony” before it made it to the publisher. So he began the tedious task of rewriting the entire novel. He chose his words very carefully and they still lingered in his mind. When he later found the original manuscript and compared it to the new one, the two versions differed by only seven words.
Tortilla Flat” won an award for being the best novel written by a Californian in1935. John became very famous. He disliked his fame and didn’t even want his photograph taken. He wanted any publicity to be about his book, not about himself. “Good writing comes out of an absence of ego,” he believed. If he thought too much about his image, his work might suffer. John’s next book to be published was “In Dubious Battle. ” It told of strikes among Californian farm workers. In 1937, John Steinbeck published “Of Mice and Men,” a story of two migrant farm workers. It was made into a Broadway production and later into a motion picture.
During the next few years Steinbeck began gathering material for one of his greatests novels. For part of his research, John Steinbeck frequently visited camps of migrant workers. He put his heart and soul into “The Grapes of Wrath, ” published in 1939 He wrote of a family from Oklahoma moving to California during the Great Depression. “The Grapes of Wrath” won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1940. It was considered his best work. At this point in his life John was described as “of giant height, with fair hair and fair mustache, and eyes the blue of the Pacific on a sunny day, and a deep, quiet slow voice.
In 1943, John and Carol Steinbeck divorced. John soon married Gwyn Conger, a dancer and actress. While they were living in New York, Gwyn gave birth to their son, Thom and two years later, Steinbecks had another boy, John, whom his father nicknamed Catbird. John became a busy with family life. He got to know the butcher and the neighbors, and before long John felt at home in New York, a city that once scared him. In January of 1945 “Cannery Row” was published. It’s a short novel inspired by Ed Ricketts and his neighbors in Monterey who worked at the fish cannery.
The novel included an essay about John’s best friend titled “About Ed Ricketts. ” In May of 1948 John learned the terrible news that Ed Ricketts had been killed in an automobile accident. When Steinbeck returned from the funeral in California, he received another shock. Gwyn told him that she no longer loved him and wanted a divorce. John Steinbeck felt despair, but found joy in summer visits with his boys. John fell in love when he met Elaine Scott, a stage manager in New York. They were married in 1950 and lived in New York, so John could be close to his sons.
John then began working on his next novel. “East of Eden” was published in 1952. It’s set in the Salinas Valley at the time of World War I. The Steinbecks traveled to Somerset, England in 1959. John produced a modern version of the tales of King Arthur. John Steinbeck’s final novel was “The Winter of Our Discontent. ” It was set in a fictional New York village telling a story of a man who is dissatisfied with his life. None of these later works seem to match the work he did on “Grapes of Wrath. ” One morning in 1962 John and Elaine Steinbeck were eating breakfast and watching the morning news.
They were startled to hear the announcer say, “John Steinbeck has been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. ” The Swedish Academy, which awards the prize each year, had elected Steinbeck ober all the other writers in the world. The prize honored not one of his books, but all of them. The Nobel Foundation was established in 1900 on the will of Alfred Nobel, Swedish chemist who invented dynamite. In his will Nobel said that the interest from his $9 million estate be used to fund the annual prizes. Perhaps Alfred Nobel set up this prize to compensate for all the destruction that his dynamite was responsible for.
Each year a medallion and cash prize is awarded in different catagories including physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, peace, and economics. The Prize is awarded to those who have made valuable contributions to the “good of humanity. ” The Nobel Prize was the greatest honor of John Steinbeck’s life. His acceptance speech concluded with the observation that “St. John the Apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man–the Word is with Man. ” After receiving the Prize, John began having heart problems and he was moved to his home in New York.
John Steinbeck died peacefully on December 20, 1968, with Elaine lying at his side. He was 66 years old. As John Steinbeck experienced life in Ameria he recorded his observation, his enjoyment of life, and his belief in human goodness. Several of his works are now considered classics. His books differ in content and in form, “Of Mice and Men” is similar to a play and “The Sea of Cortez” is a scientific account. But Steinbeck wrote all of his books with a particular goal in mind. As he explained, “My whole work drive as been aimed at making people understand each other. “
