This month, we are celebrating Author John Steinbeck’s birthday. Steinbeck was born in the farming community of Salinas, California on February 27, 1902. He died on December 20,1968.
His father, John Ernst Steinbeck, worked at several different occupations during his life, but struggled to find his niche. Steinbeck’s mother, Olive, was a strong-willed former teacher. She founded “The Wanderers,” a women's club that traveled vicariously through monthly reports.
Her husband preferred embracing his Salinas roots and had no desire to travel beyond Salinas. Though the Steinbecks were never wealthy, they were well-respected and important members of their community known for their community involvement.
Steinbeck and his three sisters had a happy childhood. He was especially close to his younger sister, Mary.
Growing up, the Steinbeck children spent a great deal of time outdoors exploring the wonders of the Salinas Valley and the Pacific Coast. Steinbeck developed an interest in the environment from an early age. He also shared his mother’s secret desire to see and experience the wonders of the world. The community saw young Steinbeck as something of a rebel. He often described himself as being “against Salinas thinking,” meaning he wanted to experience the world beyond the confines of the Salinas Valley. At fourteen, he decided he wanted to become a writer. He spent hours in his bedroom writing and escaping the confines of Salinas in his imagination. It’s ironic that Salinas served as the model for the settings of some of his most successful works.
His parents wanted him to go to college. To appease them, seventeen-year-old Steinback applied and was accepted to Stanford University. However, he only enrolled in classes like literature, writing, and sciences that interested him. From 1919 to 1925, he alternated taking classes with working on California ranches with migrants and other transient workers (hobos also known as bindlestiffs who wandered the country working at odd jobs carrying their meager possessions in a bundle tied to a stick which they carried over their shoulder). He got to know migrant farm workers by working alongside them in the fields listening to their stories about family and learning about their experiences as laborers.
In 1925, he left the university without a degree and began a series of construction jobs and worked as a reporter for a newspaper in New York City. Steinbeck returned to California to hone his writing skills. While working as a caretaker at an estate, he began writing his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929) about the privateer/pirate, Henry Morgan.
In 1930, he married his first wife, Carol. They lived in the Steinbeck family’s summer cottage. Carol looked for work, so Stenbeck could begin writing full-time. His father did not charge them rent and supplied his son with paper and loaned him money to allow him to continue writing. From 1930 to 1939, he wrote some of his best-known California-based fiction, The Pastures of Heaven (1932), To a God Unknown (1933), The Long Valley (1938), Tortilla Flat (1935), In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937 novella) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939). He also completed the novella, The Red Pony (1933).
Steinbeck favored the everyman protagonist. He wrote about their struggles in an unjust world and the hand of fate which seemed to favor the haves and punish the have nots.
He firmly supported worker’s rights leaning in favor of socialism as opposed to oligarchy and capitalism which tended to make the wealthy wealthier at the worker’s expense.
In 1930, Steinbeck also met the marine biologist, Ed Ricketts, who would become his friend and mentor. Ricketts helped Carol secure a job at his lab as a secretary/bookkeeper. Ricketts and Steinbeck shared an interest in biology and ecological philosophy and a love of music.
Steinbeck wrote Of Mice and Men as if he were writing a play. It was critically acclaimed after being adapted for the Broadway stage. Steinbeck refused to leave California to watch the play in New York because he had such a strong vision for it in his mind that he feared the actual performance would be a disappointment. In 1939, the novella was adapted into a Hollywood film starring Lon Chaney Jr. as Lenny and Burgess Meredith as George.
Tortilla Flat was Steinbeck’s first critically and commercially successful novel. It helped establish his reputation as a serious novelist. In 1942 it was adapted into a film of the same name starring Spencer Tracy, Hedy Lamar, and John Garfield. From his share of the proceeds of the film, Steinbeck was able to build a summer ranch home in Los Gatos.
The Grapes of Wrath was based on newspaper articles he wrote about migrant agricultural workers he had written for The San Francisco News in 1936. When he met with the workers, Steinbeck was appalled by their horrific working and living conditions. He promised to write a novel exposing their plight. The Grapes of Wrath became the best-selling book of 1939. It angered many powerful landowners and bankers who fought to have it banned. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt defended both the book and the author in her weekly syndicated newspaper column. In 1940, she followed up by personally visiting California labor camps where she was equally appalled by the poor living and working conditions of the agricultural workers.
Steinbeck’s marriage to Carol ended in 1941, and he married Gwyn Conger in 1942. That same year he wrote, The Moon is Down, about the spirit of resistance in a Northern European village. It was made into a film and in 1945, Steinbeck received the King Haakon VII Freedom Cross for his literary contributions to the Norwegian resistance movement.
In 1943, Steinbeck became a war correspondent for The New York Herald Tribune and worked with the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA). Steinbeck even used a Thompson submachine gun to help capture German and Italian soldiers during a raid of an island off the coast of Italy. He was wounded by shrapnel during his time as a war correspondent and suffered from PTSD after the war. Some of his writing from that period was used in the 1958 documentary Once There was a War.
For Steinbeck, writing was the best therapy for the horrors of he witnessed and experienced during the war. In 1944, he wrote Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, Lifeboat and in 1945 with screenwriter Jack Wagner, he penned A Medal for Benny about friends from his novel, Tortilla Flat going to war. In 1945, he wrote Cannery Row and in 1947, he wrote The Pearl.
In 1947, Steinbeck along with photographer Robert Capa became one of the first Americans allowed to travel in the USSR. Steinbeck wrote A Russian Journal which was illustrated by Capa’s photos in 1948. In the same year, his marriage to Gwyn ended, and Steinbeck was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Steinbeck and Gwyn shared two sons, Thomas and John.
In 1951 Steinbeck married his third wife, Elaine who he would be with until his death. The next year, he wrote the first draft of East of Eden in 276 days. He considered the 1952 novel to be the greatest challenge of his writing career, and his greatest work. As he wrote the book and corresponded with his editor, Steinbeck explored personal aspects of his life, his love of writing. and love of family. James Dean made his movie debut in the film version of East of Eden.
Steinbeck and his wife rented a cottage in England while he worked on a retelling of the legend King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. When they returned to the states, they settled in New York, After Steinbeck was diagnosed with lung cancer, he decided to make a road trip to see America one last time taking his beloved dog Charley along in a camper he designed and had specially made for their adventure. Travels with Charley (1960) compares the promise of America after World War II with the realities of segregation throughout the South and the desecration of our land and natural resources by greedy developers.
Steinbeck followed up with a novel about the moral decline of the United States in his final novel, The Winter of Our Discontent (1961). It was poorly received by critics who wanted and expected another novel with the force of the Grapes of Wrath.
In 1962, Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His selection was controversial. Critics felt he was the best of a weak assortment of writers. But if you consider his body of work, 33 books including fiction, novellas, collaborations, and non-fiction works and the variety and importance of his subjects, Steinbeck was long overdue for the honor.
In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson awarded Steinbeck The Presidential Medal of Freedom.
In 1967, Steinbeck visited Vietnam to report on the war for Newsday magazine. Both of Steinbeck’s sons both served in Vietnam. He was able to visit one son in the battlefield and was allowed to man a machine gun watch position at night at a firebase while his son and members of his unit slept.
The following year during the 1968 flu pandemic, Steinbeck died of heart disease and congestive heart disease at the age of 66.
Photo Credits:
Steinbeck Photo: Image taken from Wikipedia courtesy of the Nobel Foundation - copyright expired - Taken in Sweden 1962 when Steinbeck received his Nobel Prize for Literature - Photographer unknown.
Sources for this article:
https://steinbeck.stanford.edu/writer