JOHN STEINBECK: INTRODUCTION
John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck had a habit of signing letters and books with a tiny drawing of a winged
pig, accompanied by the Latin phrase ad astra per alia porci—to the stars on the wings
of a pig. The character, which he named "Pigasus," was meant as a reminder that man
should always strive for higher ground, no matter how lowly his skills may seem. The philosophy of Pigasus can also be applied to the novels, stories, travelogues and
plays that John Steinbeck produced over the course of his forty-year career. Steinbeck's
fiction argued that by facing the raw and sometimes ugly truth about human nature, man
could move toward a better version of himself. Whether working as a ranch hand,
interviewing migrant workers, or sailing in the Gulf of Mexico, Steinbeck was a traveler
with a purpose, observing and describing the often-painful realities of the people he
encountered. He chronicled the victims of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression with
such detail that it's nearly impossible to imagine their lives without thinking of Steinbeck.
By recording their struggles, flaws and quiet dignities in books like The Grapes of Wrath
(which critics consider his masterpiece) and East of Eden (which he preferred), Steinbeck
gave voice to a voiceless people and meaning to lives that were too often dismissed as
meaningless. Many people condemned Steinbeck's works in his lifetime (and long
after his death) as too raw, too vulgar, or too sympathetic toward unsympathetic
characters. Steinbeck shied away from publicity, and the criticism annoyed him.
However, the public's resistance to his work did not detract from the strength of his
commitment to it. For as the man himself said while accepting his Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1962, "a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of
man has no dedication nor any membership in literature."
CHILDHOOD
John Ernst Steinbeck III was born on 27 February 1902 in Salinas, California. He was the
second of four children (and the only boy) born to John Steinbeck, Sr., the treasurer of
Monterey County, and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck, a former teacher. Located near the
central California coast on some of the world's most fertile land (Salinas's official
nickname today is "the Salad Bowl of America"), Salinas was—and still is—a farming
town, surrounded by landscapes of broad yellow valleys and rich green fields.
The Salinas Valley
The Salinas River Valley
The Steinbecks lived comfortable middle-class lives. Olive, the former schoolteacher,
particularly instilled in young John III a love of reading and writing. On summer breaks
from Salinas High School, Steinbeck worked as a farm hand on the nearby Spreckels
sugar beet farm. During his summer work he noticed the difficult living conditions of his
fellow workers, many of whom were migrant laborers.
Steinbeck’s Boyhood Home
Years later those observations and the stories he heard the men tell would form the basis
of his first great book, Tortilla Flat. After graduating from high school in 1919,
Steinbeck enrolled at Stanford University. Though he enjoyed his English classes,
Steinbeck found college culture pretentious and phony. For six years he studied
intermittently at Stanford, leaving campus frequently to take odd jobs in farms, factories
or ranches. In 1925, he left for good. He never received a college degree, though he
always spoke fondly of Stanford. Steinbeck traveled via freighter to New York City
to make his living as a writer. He worked in construction and briefly as a writer for the
New York American newspaper. But Steinbeck was always a Californian at heart. He
would live in New York again later, when he was older and had established himself and
his career. To find his voice as a writer, he had to get back to the Golden State.
FIRST NOVELS
By 1926 Steinbeck was back in California, living near scenic Lake Tahoe and working as
a handyman at a resort. In 1929 he published his first novel, Cup of Gold. The book was a
quasi-historical account of the adventures of real-life pirate Henry Morgan in Panama, a
country that Steinbeck had never visited. Unsurprisingly, the book was not very good.
Steinbeck's best work always drew in some way from personal experience—from places
he had visited or people he had interviewed. (In his later years, after considerably more
critical and commercial success, Steinbeck indulged his interest in historical fiction with
a few more themed novels.) A year after publishing his first book, Steinbeck married
Carol Henning and the couple moved into a tiny cottage in coastal Pacific Grove,
California. Over the next decade, Steinbeck did some of his best writing in the humble
little building. It is where he began to find his style, and to identify the things that
mattered to him enough to write about them. Steinbeck published two more novels in
the next few years, both set in the Salinas Valley. The books drew closer to the themes
that he would later master—workers in Monterey County in The Pastures of Heaven,
man's relationship with nature in To A God Unknown—but neither attracted much critical
attention. Then in 1935, Steinbeck published Tortilla Flat, the story that first took root in
his mind in his days as a high school farmhand. Set in Monterey, California, the novel
focused on a group of paisanos (men of Mexican, Indian, Spanish and Caucasian
background, according to Steinbeck) and their friendship and exploits in the years after
World War I. The book was a great commercial and critical success. It won Steinbeck his
first Gold Medal from the California Commonwealth Club, a prize awarded for the best
novel by a Californian (he won another the following year for In Dubious Battle). John
Steinbeck had found his voice, and just in time—as the flamboyant excesses of the
Roaring Twenties came to a close, writers and readers were ready to get down to more
serious matters.
GREAT DEPRESSION
As John Steinbeck was developing as a writer, events taking place in the United States
provided him with plenty of material to write about. In October 1929 the U.S. stock
market crashed, sparking the Great Depression. Banks collapsed. Businesses closed. By
1933, a quarter of the population was unemployed. Then environmental catastrophe
struck as well. From 1930 to 1936, severe drought plagued the Great Plains of the
American Midwest, which at the time were mostly farmland. The drought killed crops,
and with no plants to hold down the soil, the dry dirt swirled up into suffocating dust
storms when the winds kicked in. The entire region became known as the Dust Bowl. The
Oklahoma panhandle was the hardest hit. Farmers' crops were destroyed, and with
nothing to sell many lost their homes and farms. They were forced to migrate in search of
work. Men who had once been their own bosses were now forced to work for wages on
other people's farms, often in exploitative conditions. In 1934 Steinbeck met two
labor organizers who were hiding in Seaside, California after participating in a cotton
strike in the San Joaquin Valley the previous year. Steinbeck shaped his interviews with
the men into the pro-worker novel In Dubious Battle, published in 1936. Steinbeck also
spent part of that year traveling with a group of migrant workers displaced by the Dust
Bowl for a San Francisco News series. Steinbeck was horrified by their plight and
empathized with the men's sense of dignity. "They are men who have worked hard on
their own farms and have felt the pride of possessing and living in close touch with the
land," he wrote. "They are resourceful and intelligent Americans who have gone through
the hell of the drought, have seen their lands wither and die and the top soil blow away;
and this, to a man who has owned his land, is a curious and terrible pain." The migrants'
stories of humiliation and hardship stayed with Steinbeck long after the newspaper series
ran. He then published Of Mice and Men, a novella that he also conceived as a play
(and, originally, as a children's book—an unsettling thought, given the plot of the final
manuscript. Let's hope Steinbeck had a different ending in mind for kids). The plot
centers on two migrant ranch hands, George and the mentally challenged Lennie, and
their simple yet ultimately thwarted dream of owning their own land. Of Mice and Men
appeared in print in February 1937 and on the stage later that year. Though the book is
required reading in many schools— maybe it's even the reason you're reading this
biography right now—it is also among the most frequently challenged and banned books
in American libraries and schools. The novel has been criticized for everything from its
coarse language to its depiction of the mentally disabled to its seeming anti-business
slant. Steinbeck was not a man who wrote for shock value. His goal with Of Mice and
Men—and with the rest of his fiction—was to heal the wounds between people by
helping them to understand one another's lives. "In every bit of honest writing in the
world . . . there is a base theme. Try to understand men, [for] if you understand each other
you will be kind to each other," he wrote in a 1938 journal entry. "Knowing a man well
never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love." The reaction to Of Mice and
Men was only a hint of what was to come next. In 1939, Steinbeck published The Grapes
of Wrath. The book traces the odyssey of the Joad family, a clan of Dust Bowl
sharecroppers who migrate to California after they are kicked off their Oklahoma farm.
Headed by convicted murderer and recent parolee Tom Joad, the family sees California
as a promised land of employment and prosperity. As they travel west, their dream
collapses amidst the squalid migrant camps, exploitative farm owners and discriminatory
policies. The book was wildly successful. It won Steinbeck the Pulitzer Prize and the
National Book Award. More than 500,000 copies flew off the shelves in its first year. It
soon became clear, however, that not all of those who picked up a copy liked what they
read. Critics called it socialist propaganda. School boards and libraries banned the book
for its alleged "obscenities" and coarse language. The Associated Farmers of America
protested the book's treatment of corporate farmers. The Kern County (California) Board
of Supervisors passed a resolution attempting to block production of the 1940 film
version starring Henry Fonda. At one point Steinbeck grew concerned about the level of
hysteria surrounding the book, especially in his agricultural hometown of Salinas. But
Steinbeck wrote to provoke social change, and The Grapes of Wrath accomplished that.
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt came to the book's defense, and congressional hearings
were later held on the conditions in migrant camps. The book also secured John
Steinbeck's place in the American literary canon. He went on to write several more
books—including at least one that he liked better than The Grapes of Wrath—but none
eclipsed the novel that is widely considered the masterpiece of his career.
POLITICAL AND PERSONAL LIFE
Steinbeck never allowed his personal life—that is to say, his romantic and family
business—to seep into his fiction. In 1941 he divorced his first wife and moved to New
York City with his new romantic interest Gwyndolyn Conger. The couple married in
1943 and had two sons, Steinbeck's only children, in 1944 and 1946. Within two years of
their youngest son's birth they too were divorced, and in 1950 Steinbeck married Elaine
Anderson Scott, his third and final wife. Steinbeck was an intensely private man, even
after he became famous, and despised public scrutiny of his personal affairs.
Steinbeck wrote about personal experience in a different way. His interests stretched
from marine biology to history, and he used the years after his Grapes of Wrath fame to
explore other topics that intrigued him. In 1940 he spent six weeks in the Gulf of Mexico
with his close friend, the marine biologist Ed Ricketts. The two men co-wrote a book
about the expedition entitled Sea of Cortez. In the early years of World War II Steinbeck
traveled to Europe and North Africa as a war correspondent for the New York Herald
Tribune. He also wrote for film, earning a screen credit for Elia Kazan's Emiliano Zapata
biopic "Viva Zapata!" and an Academy Award nomination for his work on the 1944
Alfred Hitchcock picture "Lifeboat." He also continued to publish novels set in Steinbeck
Country, such as Cannery Row in 1945 and The Wayward Bus in 1947. Steinbeck
made his first trip to the Soviet Union in 1947 as a journalist, accompanied by the
photographer Robert Capa. Even before the trip, the pro-worker sentiments of his novels
had attracted government suspicion. He was under surveillance by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation starting in the early 1940s, though apparently the bureau was not all that
discreet. "Do you suppose you could ask Edgar's boys to stop stepping on my heels?"
Steinbeck wrote to Attorney General Francis Biddle in 1942, referring to FBI director J.
Edgar Hoover. "They think I am an enemy alien. It is getting tiresome." His trip to Russia
confirmed many people's suspicions that Steinbeck was a socialist. But while Steinbeck's
work and travels brought him into frequent contact with labor organizers, strikers, and
communists, he was not a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, Socialist Party,
or any other particular camp. Books such as In Dubious Battle showed workers being
manipulated by labor organizers as well as by corporate farmers. Steinbeck was no
revolutionary; in his later years, his friendship with President Lyndon B. Johnson and his
largely pro-war reporting on Vietnam drew criticism from liberals and leftists.
NOBEL PRIZE
Steinbeck and his Nobel Prize
Steinbeck devoted the final years of his life to traveling and writing. While he never
achieved the same level of critical success that he did with The Grapes of Wrath, he
continued to challenge himself in his work. In 1952 he published East of Eden, an epic
novel that spans American history from the Civil War to World War I. Steinbeck
considered it to be his masterpiece. Steinbeck wrote about the Trask family's battles with
good and evil after an extremely difficult period in his life in which he divorced his
second wife and his close friend Ed Ricketts died. He called it "the story of my country
and the story of me," adding that in previous novels he had always "held something back
for later. Nothing is held back here." His writing became more philosophical in his later
years. He wrestled overtly with questions of morality in books like Travels With Charley,
the memoir of a cross-country road trip with his pet poodle, and The Winter of Our
Discontent, his final novel. Steinbeck was showered with literary honors in his later
years, though most of the prizes referred to work he had completed almost two decades
earlier. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Lyndon Johnson in 1964,
with a note declaring he had "helped America to understand herself by finding universal
themes in the experience of men and women everywhere. Two years earlier, he was
honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature. Upon presenting the award, the head of the
Swedish Academy called Steinbeck "a teacher of good will and charity, a defender of
human values." Steinbeck described his philosophy on writing in his acceptance speech,
saying that "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."
On 20 December 20 1968, John Steinbeck died of a heart attack in New York City.
His ashes were buried in Salinas, California. Forty years after his death, it's clear that
mankind is far from achieving the ideals of perfection and understanding that Steinbeck
advocated in his work. But maybe, thanks to his words, we're all just the tiniest bit closer.