JOHN STEINBECK
An Introduction
JOHN
STEINBECK



John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was born in Salinas,
California, near Monterey on February 27, 1902 of
German and Irish ancestry.
His father was treasurer of Monterey County and his
mother was a public school teacher.
An avid reader, he was influenced by Malory, Hardy,
Dostoevsky, Flaubert, George Eliot, Milton and the
Bible.



After graduating from Salinas High School, he
attended Stanford University but did not graduate.
Instead, he left for New York in 1925 to establish a
career as a writer, but he was unsuccessful and
returned to California.
He worked a series of odd jobs as a hired hand on
nearby ranches, a road construction worker, a
caretaker, a chemist, a freight handler, a sugar beet
factory worker, and a fruit picker.


His first three novels earned little
literary attention until, in 1935, he
published Tortilla Flat. Tortilla Flat
finally brought Steinbeck the critical and
financial success he had been working
so hard to achieve.
In 1937, his dog chewed up half of an
original manuscript entitled Something
That Happened. He recreated it from
memory, completed the work, changed
the title to Of Mice and Men, and sent it
to his publisher two months later.


Of Mice and Men is an experiment in
literary form: Steinbeck blends narrative
with dramatic technique. For example,
although the novel technically may be said
to have an omniscient narrator, the
narrator’s role is sharply limited. Steinbeck
only reveals a character’s thoughts or what
is happening outside the immediate scene
through dramatic means—an action,
gesture, facial expression, or dialogue. In
short, Steinbeck’s primary aim is showing
rather than telling.
Maybe this is why Of Mice and Men, when
adapted into a play, was such a huge hit
with critics and audiences on Broadway.

During the 1930s, Steinbeck was concerned about the plight of
America’s downtrodden and dispossessed. From 1935 to 1940,
exiles from the drought-plagued Southwest poured into California,
drawn by the conviction that California was the promised land, a
place to begin anew with employment in the orange groves and
lettuce fields. More than 350,000 people from Oklahoma, Arkansas,
and Texas came to California for employment. California could not
employ all of these people. So from the mid 1930s until 1940, the
migrants moved restlessly up and down the state, waiting for crops
to ripen, longing for work.




In fact, he missed the opening night of Of Mice and Men
on Broadway because he was traveling with a group of migrant
workers from Oklahoma to California.
In 1939 Steinbeck published the story of their lives in the
best-selling novel and controversial exposé Grapes of Wrath.
This masterpiece won a Pulitzer prize and the National Book Award.
In 1962, Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He
was praised for his impartial instinct for truth in a particularly
American vein.



John Steinbeck died December 20, 1968.
In 1974, his Salinas home was opened as a
museum and restaurant.
Learn more about the National Steinbeck Center at
www.steinbeck.org.
Throughout his work, Steinbeck advocated a kind of
“moral ecology,” emphasizing the need for humans
and nature to be in partnership. He was ultimately
more interested in what unites humanity than what
causes isolation.
Much of Steinbeck’s work focuses on the outcasts of
society—the poor, the demented, the uneducated,
and the rebellious. His obvious sympathy for the
underdog reveals that the inhumanity that
individuals inflict upon each other never failed to
outrage him.
“Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it and it has not
changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are
not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties,
their responsibilities have been decreed by our species…the writer is delegated
to declare and to celebrate man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and
spirit—for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless
war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and
emulation. I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the
perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.”
--John Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
WORKS BY STEINBECK
Cup of Gold (1929)
The Pastures of Heaven
(1932)
To a God Unknown (1933)
Tortilla Flat (1935)
In Dubious Battle (1936)
Of Mice and Men (1937)
The Long Valley (1938)
The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
The Forgotten Village (1941)
The Sea of Cortez (1941)
The Moon is Down (1942)
Bombs Away: The Story of a
Bomber Team (1942)
Cannery Row (1945)
The Pearl (1947)
The Wayward Bus (1947)
East of Eden (1952)
Sweet Thursday (1954)
The Short Reign of Pippin IV
(1957)
The Winter of Our Discontent
(1961)
Travels with Charley (1962)