John Steinbeck
One of our great California writers
Early Days
• Steinbeck was born February 27 1902 in Salinas,
which was and is in the heart of California’s
agricultural industry and the area of the state
where much of his literature takes place
• His father was a county controller and his mother
a teacher
• At 14, he decided to become a writer and would
often lock himself inside his room writing short
stories
College and Early Adulthood
• Steinbeck attended Stanford to study Marine
Biology, but didn’t finish and moved briefly to
New York City to establish himself as a writer
and a reporter. He was fired from his
reporting job, and after finding little success
as a writer, moved back to California
Early Writing
• As he worked numerous jobs, including being
a caretaker in Lake Tahoe, he wrote his first
novel, Cup of Gold, a novel about a Jamaican
pirate, in 1929. This was also when and where
he met and married his first wife, Carol, who
helped to support him financially as he
established himself as a writer. In all,
Steinbeck was married three times in his life.
Successful Writing
• His first successful writing was Tortilla Flats, a
humorous novel about life in the Monterey
area of California (which is near Salinas), was
published in 1935.
• His next popular novels, which was of a more
serious tone, included, amongst others, Of
Mice and Men, in 1937.
The Grapes of Wrath
• In 1939, Steinbeck published The Grapes of
Wrath, the story of an Oklahoma family who
moved to California and struggled to survive
during The Great Depression. The book
reflected the mood in the country at the time,
and earned him the Pulitzer Prize, one of the
two highest honors an author can achieve.
Middle Years
• Steinbeck worked as a war reported for the
New York Herald Tribune during World War II.
• He traveled to Mexico with a friend, who was
a marine biologist, to collect sea life. He used
these experiences to write Sea of Cortez,
which described sea life in the Gulf of
California.
Controversy
• Steinbeck was an advocate for the
underprivileged, which made him unpopular
with many Americans, so the popularity of his
novels in American waned, even though he
remained extremely popular in Europe
Later Years
• In the last 25 years of his life, he wrote many
great novels, such as Cannery Row in 1945,
East of Eden in 1952, and Travels with Charlie
in 1962
• In 1962, Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel
Prize in Literature, the other of the highest
honors that a writer can achieve.
Death
• Steinbeck died of heart disease in New York
City in 1968 at the age of 66.