John Steinbeck
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“I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession.” (George 1) This is a quote by John Steinbeck that shows exactly how he felt about being a writer. Steinbeck, a Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize for Literature winner, is a very popular author in the United States of America, even after his death. He is known for his very realistic portrayals of the working class society, especially in his beloved Salinas, California. He was also a prominent spokesman for the victims of the Great Depression. Most importantly, Steinbeck understood that readers wanted to know the truth in the world. The truth that he would write about, he found much of in his early life.
John Ernst Steinbeck was born February 27, 1902 of German and Irish heritage. His parents were John and Olive Steinbeck. Steinbecks father was a quiet, disappointed man who had failed at managing a mill and failed, again, at running his own feed store. Perhaps as a reaction to this, Steinbecks mother, a former school teacher, was filled with ambition for her son. She hoped he would be a doctor or lawyer. She was very important to John, as well as to American literature, because she is why he became interested in literature. (Bloom 19) It was his one of his greatest disappointments that neither parent of his lived to see him achieve his huge success as a writer. He had a very typical childhood for a boy that lived in Salinas in the early twentieth century. He had two older sisters, Esther and Beth, who adored him to death. He also had a third sister, Mary, who was three years younger than him. He and Mary shared a pony which stayed in a stable just a couple of blocks away from their house. (Bloom 21) His parents were involved in the local community. Even after his fathers lack of success in business, local townspeople came to the families rescue by getting him a lifetime appointment as the treasurer of Monterey County. (National Steinbeck Center)
Salinas, California. This town, located in the county of Monterey, is where Steinbeck was born and is also where he grew up. Salinas is on the central coast of California and is next to the Salinas River. The town was small throughout his early childhood but grew larger and more prosperous as his years there went on. Although this growth was taking place, it was still a hard working agricultural town. The “American Salad Bowl,” as it is commonly referred to, is at the mouth of the Salinas Valley, which is where Steinbeck got a lot of his material for his literary career. He would work in the Valley during his summers at ranches with migrant workers. This is where he learned of the realities of being a migrant worker, along with the fierce realities of human nature. When he wasn’t working he would travel the Valley. (Potter 1) He took in the sights, sounds, and smells of his beloved hometown and they deeply affected him and his writing. His first stories were written as a teenager in the house where he was born. This began John Steinbecks love for the valley of his birthplace. This affair would take him from a struggling writer to a Pulitzer Prize-winning author celebrated around the world. Steinbeck spent his youth soaking up the rich agricultural valley that would become the setting of many of his novels and stories. (Potter 1)
Steinbeck attended the local high school and worked on farms and ranches during his vacations. He would graduate in 1919. To pay for his education, he held many jobs and sometimes dropped out of college for long periods of time. Between 1920 and 1926, he studied marine biology at Stanford University, but did not take a degree because he always planned to be a writer.(Kiernan 13)He did take courses at Stanford that were writing based though. Several of his early poems and stories were put into the university publications. Although he met some people that helped him become a better writer, he felt his time at Stanford University was a complete and utter failure. (Kiernan 14) After spending a short time as a laborer and reporter in New York City, Steinbeck returned to California. While writing, Steinbeck took small jobs so he had some source of income. He was an apprentice painter, a caretaker, a surveyor, and even a fruit-picker. During a period, when he was a watchman of a house in the High Sierra, Steinbeck wrote his first book, Cup of Gold (1929). (National Steinbeck Center)
It was obvious that by the late 1920’s and early 1930’s that Steinbeck had found his feet. The requirements of writers seem to be a man of desire, ability, training, subject matter, solitude and leisure. In addition to desire, which led him to the habit of writing every morning, he had found his subject in the people and landscape of the farmland of the Salinas Valley. His natural ability had been encouraged by his writing teachers in high school and at Stanford. He was to a certain extent self-taught. He did this by being an attentive reader and he became sensitive to the writing styles of other people and guarded against being overly influenced by writers such as his contemporary Hemingway.(Parini 24) He found privacy as a caretaker of a cottage at Lake Tahoe, and made himself leisure time by reducing his needs in order to live within his income. He wrote to friends, bought two dogs, and drank, completely aware that his parents believed him to be throwing his life away. In April, 1929 he sent his manuscript of Cup of Gold to Ted Miller, who had agreed to become his agent. In June of that year, he met Carol Henning who was to become his first wife (he would later divorce and remarry). She was a smart, independent woman who was willing to type Steinbecks work and also critique it at the same time. She was more outgoing than her husband, who remained shy to the end of his life. Even more importantly, she had a social conscience; she read newspapers and knew how the nations economic collapse was affecting ordinary people. (Shillingshaw) All of this led to Steinbeck eventually getting published.
Steinbecks first novel, Cup of Gold, was published in 1929, and was followed by The Pastures of Heaven in 1933 and To a God Unknown. However, his first three novels were unsuccessful both critically and as far as sales went. Steinbeck had his first success with Tortilla Flat (1935), a warm and somewhat humorous story about Mexican-Americans. Nevertheless, his following novel, In Dubious Battle (1936) was notable for its grim outlook. This novel is a classic account of a strike by agricultural laborers and a couple of Marxist labor workers who organize it, and is the first Steinbeck novel to encompass the striking social commentary that characterizes his most notable works. (George)
Steinbeck received even greater acclaim for the novella Of Mice and Men