Steinbeck decided while in high school that he wanted to be a writer. He also enjoyed playing sports and worked during the summer on various ranches. Steinbeck worked as a laboratory assistant and farm laborer to support himself through six years of study at Stanford University, where he took only those courses that interested him without seeking a degree.
In he traveled to New York by way of the Panama Canal on a freighter boat that carries inventory. After arriving in New York, he worked as a reporter and as part of a construction crew building Madison Square Garden. During this time he was also collecting impressions for his first novel. Cup of Gold was an unsuccessful attempt at romance involving the pirate Henry Morgan.
Undiscouraged, Steinbeck returned to California to begin work as a writer of serious fiction. A collection of short stories, The Pastures of Heaven , contained vivid descriptions of rural farm life among the "unfinished children of nature" in his native California valley.
His second novel, To a God Unknown , was his strongest statement about man's relationship to the land. With Tortilla Flat Steinbeck received critical and popular success; there are many critics who consider it his most artistically satisfying work. John Steinbeck. Steinbeck next dealt with the problems of labor unions in In Dubious Battle , an effective story of a strike when workers all decide to stop working as a form of protest against unfair treatment by local grape pickers. Of Mice and Men , first conceived as a play, is a tightly constructed novella short novel about an unusual friendship between two migrant workers laborers who travel to wherever there is available work, usually on farms.
Although the book is powerfully written and often moving, some critics feel that it lacks a moral vision. Steinbeck's series of articles for the San Francisco Chronicle on the problems of migrant farm laborers provided material for The Grapes of Wrath , his major novel and the finest working-class novel of the s. The Grapes of Wrath relates the struggle of a family of Oklahoma tenant farmers forced to turn over their land to the banks.
Hell, I thought I was building the war up. Certainly we were thinking more universally. While traveling to Mexico to help with the film adaptation of the novel, Steinbeck became inspired by the story of Emiliano Zapata, and subsequently wrote a screenplay based on his life. Ed Ricketts had been hit by a train while attempting to cross the tracks in Monterey.
Steinbeck hurried west, but he arrived too late. Ricketts died from injuries sustained from the accident on May 11, The the two men had shared an intense working relationship as well as a deep personal friendship. The resulting book was to be called The Outer Shores and would have focused on marine life near Alaska.
After nearly six years of marriage, Gwyn Steinbeck asked for a divorce. In he returned to the cabin in Pacific Grove and threw himself into his work.
Early in , Steinbeck began again to compose the novel he had planned for years. I am choosing to write this book to my sons. They are little boys now and they will never know what they came from through me, unless I tell them…I want them to know how it was, I want to tell them directly, and perhaps by speaking directly to them I shall speak directly to other people… And so I will tell them one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest story of all—the story of good and evil, of strength and weakness, of love and hate, of beauty and ugliness… I shall tell them this story against the background of the county I grew up in.
In this epic novel of intertwined stories, Steinbeck captures his own history as well as the history of the Salinas Valley—and he also grapples with the pain and consequences of his divorce from his second wife, Gwyn. The novel took nearly a year to complete, and was finally published in Shortly after, Elia Kazan directed the film version of the final part of the novel, which starred James Dean in his debut performance.
Steinbeck traveled widely with his third wife, Elaine, and he supported himself writing journalism about his travels. To facilitate his research, Steinbeck spent ten months in Somerset, England with Elaine, gathering material and working on the translation. Publication of that novel earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he was awarded for his body of work in That year also saw publication of one of his most endearing books, Travels with Charley He felt that he had lost touch with his own country:.
I, an American writer, writing about America, was working from memory, and the memory at best is a faulty, warpy reservoir. I had not heard the speech of America, smelled the grass and trees and sewage, seen its hills and water, its color and quality of light. I knew the changes only from books and newspapers. But more than this, I had not felt the country for twenty-five years.
In , Steinbeck enrolled at Stanford University—a decision that had more to do with pleasing his parents than anything else—but the budding writer would prove to have little use for college. Over the next six years, Steinbeck drifted in and out of school, eventually dropping out for good in without a degree. Learn more at Biography. Steinbeck struck a more serious tone with In Dubious Battle and The Long Valley , a collection of short stories.
In , the author received the Nobel Prize for Literature — "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception. Around this same time, he traveled to Mexico to collect marine life with friend Edward F. Ricketts, a marine biologist.
Their collaboration resulted in the book Sea of Cortez , which describes marine life in the Gulf of California. Steinbeck was married three times and had two sons. In , Steinbeck met and married his first wife, Carol Henning. Over the following decade, he poured himself into his writing with Carol's support and paycheck, until the couple divorced in Steinbeck was married to his second wife, Gwyndolyn Conger, from to The couple had two sons together, Thomas born and John born In , Steinbeck wed his third wife, Elaine Anderson Scott.
The couple remained together until his death in We strive for accuracy and fairness.
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