| Name | John Steinbeck |
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| Caption | Photo of John Steinbeck taken in Sweden during his trip to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. |
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| Birthname | John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. |
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| Birthdate | February 27, 1902 |
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| Birthplace | Salinas, California |
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| Deathdate | December 20, 1968 |
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| Deathplace | New York City, New York, United States |
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| Occupation | Novelist, short story writer, war correspondent |
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| Notableworks | The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, Of Mice and Men |
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John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. (February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) was an
American writer. He is widely known for the
Pulitzer Prize-winning novel
The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and
East of Eden (1952) and the novella
Of Mice and Men (1937). He was an author of twenty-seven books, including sixteen novels, six non-fiction books and five collections of short stories; Steinbeck received the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.
Life
, the home where Steinbeck lived his childhood]]
John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was born on February 27, 1902, in
Salinas, California. He was of German and Irish descent. Johann Adolf Großsteinbeck, Steinbeck's paternal grandfather, had shortened the family name to Steinbeck when he immigrated to the United States. The family farm in
Heiligenhaus, Germany, is still today named "Großsteinbeck."
His father, John Ernst Steinbeck, served as Monterey County treasurer. John's mother, Olive Hamilton, a former school teacher, shared Steinbeck's passion of reading and writing. Steinbeck lived in a small rural town that was essentially a frontier settlement, set amid some of the world's most fertile land.
In 1919, Steinbeck graduated from Salinas High School and attended Stanford University intermittently until 1925, eventually leaving without a degree. He traveled to New York City and held odd jobs while pursuing his dream of becoming a writer. When he failed to get his work published, he returned to California and worked for a time in 1928 as a tour guide and caretaker at the fish hatchery in Tahoe City, where he would meet tourist Carol Henning, his future first wife.
After the publication of his Monterey novel Tortilla Flat in 1935, his first clear novelistic success, the Steinbecks emerged from relative poverty and built a summer ranch-home in Los Gatos. In 1940, Steinbeck went on a voyage around the Gulf of California with his influential friend Ed Ricketts, to collect biological specimens. The Log from the Sea of Cortez describes his experiences. Although Carol accompanied Steinbeck on the trip, their marriage was beginning to suffer by this time, and would effectively end in 1941, even as Steinbeck worked on the manuscript for the book. With his second wife Steinbeck had his only children–Thomas ("Thom") Myles Steinbeck born 1944 and John Steinbeck IV (1946–1991).
In 1943, Steinbeck served as a World War II war correspondent. Steinbeck accompanied the commando raids of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.'s Beach Jumpers program, which launched small-unit diversion operations against German-held islands in the Mediterranean. In 1944, wounded by a close munitions explosion in North Africa, the war-weary author resigned from his work and returned home.
In 1947, Steinbeck made the first of many trips to the Soviet Union, this one with renowned photographer Robert Capa. They visited Moscow, Kiev, Tbilisi, Batumi and Stalingrad, becoming some of the first Westerners to visit many parts of the USSR since the communist revolution. Steinbeck's book about their experiences, A Russian Journal, was illustrated with Capa's photos. In 1948, the year the book was published, Steinbeck was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In May, 1948 Steinbeck traveled to California on an emergency trip to be with his closest friend Ed Ricketts, who had been seriously injured when his car was struck by a train. Ricketts died hours before Steinbeck arrived. On returning home from this devastating trip, Steinbeck was confronted by Gwyn, who told him she wanted a divorce for various reasons related to estrangement. She could not be dissuaded, and the divorce became final in August of that same year. Steinbeck spent the year after Ricketts' death in deep depression, by his own account.
In June, 1949, Steinbeck met stage-manager Elaine Scott at a restaurant in Carmel, California. Steinbeck and Scott eventually began a relationship and in December, 1950, Steinbeck and Scott married, within a week of the finalizing of Scott's own divorce from actor Zachary Scott. This third marriage for Steinbeck lasted until Steinbeck's death in 1968.
John Steinbeck died in New York City on December 20, 1968 of heart disease and congestive heart failure. He was 66, and had been a life-long smoker. An autopsy showed nearly complete occlusion of the main coronary arteries. at the Hamilton family gravesite at Garden of Memories Memorial Park in Salinas, with those of his parents and maternal grandparents. His third wife, Elaine, was buried in the plot in 2004. Steinbeck followed this wave of success with The Grapes of Wrath (1939), based on newspaper articles he had written in San Francisco. The novel would be considered by many to be his finest work. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940, even as it was made into a notable film directed by John Ford, starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, who was nominated for an Academy Award for the part.
The success of the novel was not free of controversy. Steinbeck's New Deal political views, negative portrayal of aspects of capitalism, and sympathy for the plight of workers, led to a backlash against the author, especially close to home. Claiming the book was both obscene and misrepresented conditions in the county, the Kern County Board of Supervisors banned the book from the county's publicly funded schools and libraries in August 1939. This ban lasted until January 1941.
Of the controversy, Steinbeck wrote, "The vilification of me out here from the large landowners and bankers is pretty bad. The latest is a rumor started by them that the Okies hate me and have threatened to kill me for lying about them. I'm frightened at the rolling might of this damned thing. It is completely out of hand; I mean a kind of hysteria about the book is growing that is not healthy."
The film versions of The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men (by two different movie studios) were in production simultaneously, allowing Steinbeck to spend a full day on the set of The Grapes of Wrath and the next day on the set of Of Mice and Men.
Ed Ricketts
In the 1930s and 1940s,
Ed Ricketts strongly influenced Steinbeck's writing. Steinbeck frequently took small trips with Ricketts along the California coast to give Steinbeck time off from his writing However, in 1951, Steinbeck republished the narrative portion of the book as
The Log from the Sea of Cortez, under his name only (though Ricketts had written some of it). This work remains in print today.
Ricketts was Steinbeck's model for the character of "Doc" in Cannery Row (1945) and Sweet Thursday (1954), "Friend Ed" in Burning Bright, and characters in In Dubious Battle (1936) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Ecological themes recur in Steinbeck's novels of the period.
Steinbeck's close relations with Ricketts ended in 1941 when Steinbeck moved away from Pacific Grove and divorced from his wife Carol.
World War II
His novel
The Moon is Down (1942), about the
Socrates-inspired spirit of resistance in an occupied village in northern Europe, was made into a film almost immediately. It was presumed that the unnamed country of the novel was Norway and the occupiers the
Nazis, and in 1945 Steinbeck received the
Haakon VII Cross of freedom for his literary contributions to the Norwegian resistance movement.
In 1943, Steinbeck served as a World War II war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune and worked with the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the CIA). It was at that time he became friends with Will Lang, Jr. of Time/Life magazine. During the war, Steinbeck accompanied the commando raids of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.'s Beach Jumpers program, which launched small-unit diversion operations against German-held islands in the Mediterranean. Some of his writings from this period were incorporated in the documentary Once There Was a War (1958).
Steinbeck returned from the war with a number of wounds from shrapnel and some psychological trauma. He treated himself, as ever, by writing. He wrote Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944), and the film A Medal for Benny (1945) with screenwriter Jack Wagner about paisanos from Tortilla Flat going to war. He later requested that his name be removed from the credits of Lifeboat because he believed the final version of the film had racist undertones. In 1944, suffering from homesickness for his Pacific Grove/Monterey life of the 1930s, he also wrote Cannery Row (1945) which became so famous that Ocean View Avenue in Monterey, the location of the book, was eventually renamed Cannery Row in 1958.
After the end of the war, he wrote The Pearl (1947), already knowing it would be filmed. The story first appeared in the December 1945 issue of Woman's Home Companion magazine as "The Pearl of the World." It was illustrated by John Alan Maxwell. The novel is an imaginative telling of a story which Steinbeck had heard in La Paz in 1940, as related in The Log From the Sea of Cortez, which he described in Chapter 11 as being "so much like a parable that it almost can't be". Steinbeck traveled to Mexico for the filming with Wagner who helped with the script; on this trip he would be inspired by the story of Emiliano Zapata, and subsequently wrote a film script (Viva Zapata!) directed by Elia Kazan and starring Marlon Brando and Anthony Quinn.
New York
Steinbeck married for the last time in 1950. Soon after, he began work on
East of Eden (1952), which he considered his best work.
In 1952, John Steinbeck appeared as the on-screen narrator of 20th Century Fox's film, O. Henry's Full House. Although Steinbeck later admitted he was uncomfortable before the camera, he provided interesting introductions to several filmed adaptations of short stories by the legendary writer O. Henry. About the same time, Steinbeck recorded readings of several of his short stories for Columbia Records; despite some stiffness, the recordings provide a record of Steinbeck's deep, resonant voice.
Following the success of Viva Zapata!, Steinbeck collaborated with Kazan on East of Eden, James Dean's film debut.
, camper truck in which Steinbeck traveled across the United States in 1960]]
Travels with Charley (subtitle: In Search of America) is a travelogue of his 1960 road trip with his poodle Charley. Steinbeck bemoans his lost youth and roots, while dispensing both criticism and praise for America. According to Steinbeck's son Thom, Steinbeck went on the trip because he knew he was dying and wanted to see the country one last time.
Steinbeck's last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), examines moral decline in America. The protagonist Ethan grows discontented with his own moral decline and that of those around him.
Apparently taken aback not only by the critical reception of this novel, but also the critical outcry when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, Steinbeck published no more fiction in the next six years before his death.
Nobel Prize
In 1962, Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for literature for his “realistic and imaginative writing, combining as it does sympathetic humor and keen social perception.” On the day of the announcement (Oct. 25) when he was asked by a reporter at a press conference given by his publisher, if he thought he deserved the Nobel, he said: "Frankly, no." At his own first Nobel Prize press conference he was asked his favorite authors and works and replied: "Hemingway's short stories and nearly everything Faulkner wrote."
In 1967, at the behest of Newsday magazine, Steinbeck went to Vietnam to report on the war there. Thinking of the Vietnam War as a heroic venture, he was considered a hawk for his position on that war. His sons both served in Vietnam prior to his death, and Steinbeck visited one son in the battlefield (at one point being allowed to man a machine-gun watch position at night at a firebase, while his son and other members of his platoon slept).
After Steinbeck's death, his incomplete novel based on the King Arthur legends of Malory and others, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, was finally published in 1976.
On Feb. 27, 1979, on what would have been his 77th birthday, he was honored by being placed on a U.S. postage stamp.
Legacy
The day after Steinbeck's death in New York City, reviewer Charles Poore wrote in the
New York Times: "John Steinbeck's first great book was his last great book. But Good Lord, what a book that was and is:
The Grapes of Wrath." Poore noted a "preachiness" in Steinbeck's work, "as if half his literary inheritance came from the best of
Mark Twain— and the other half from the worst of
Cotton Mather." But he asserted that "Steinbeck didn't need the
Nobel Prize— the Nobel judges needed him."
Many of Steinbeck's works are on required reading lists in American high schools. In the United Kingdom, Of Mice and Men is one of the key texts used by the examining body AQA for its English Literature GCSE. A study by the Center for the Learning and Teaching of Literature in the United States found that Of Mice and Men was one of the ten most frequently read books in public high schools.
At the same time, The Grapes of Wrath has been banned by school boards: In August 1939, Kern County Board of Supervisors banned the book from the county's publicly funded schools and libraries. It was burned in Salinas on two different occasions. In 2003, a school board in Mississippi banned it on the grounds of profanity. According to the American Library Association Steinbeck was one of the ten most frequently banned authors from 1990 to 2004, with Of Mice and Men ranking sixth out of 100 such books in the United States.
Literary influences
Steinbeck grew up in California's Salinas Valley, a culturally diverse place with a rich migratory and immigrant history. This upbringing imparted a regionalistic flavor to his writing, giving many of his works a distinct
sense of place.
The National Steinbeck Center, two blocks away at One Main Street is the only museum in the U.S. dedicated to a single author. Dana Gioia (chair of the National Endowment for the Arts) told an audience at the Center, "This is really the best modern literary shrine in the country, and I've seen them all." Its "Steinbeckiana" includes "Rocinante," the camper-truck in which Steinbeck made the cross-country trip described in "Travels with Charley."
His father's cottage on Eleventh Street in Pacific Grove, where Steinbeck wrote some of his earliest books, also survives.
On December 5, 2007 California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver inducted Steinbeck into the California Hall of Fame, located at The California Museum for History, Women and the Arts. His son, author Thomas Steinbeck, accepted the award on his behalf.
Political views
in the Oval Office, May 16, 1966. John is shortly to leave for active duty in Vietnam.]]
Steinbeck's contacts with
leftist authors, journalists, and
labor union figures may have influenced his writing and he joined the
League of American Writers, a Communist organization, in 1935. Steinbeck was mentored by radical writers
Lincoln Steffens and his wife
Ella Winter. Through
Francis Whitaker, a member of the
United States Communist Party’s
John Reed Club for writers, Steinbeck met with strike organizers from the
Cannery and Agricultural Workers' Industrial Union.
In 1967, when he was sent to Vietnam to report on the war, his sympathetic portrayal of the United States Army led the New York Post to denounce him for betraying his liberal past. Steinbeck's biographer, Jay Parini, says Steinbeck's friendship with President Lyndon B. Johnson influenced his views on Vietnam. Steinbeck may also have been concerned about the safety of his son serving in Vietnam.
Steinbeck was a close associate of playwright Arthur Miller. In June 1959, Steinbeck took a personal and professional risk by standing up for him when Miller refused to name names in the House Un-American Activities Committee trials.
Government harassment
Steinbeck complained publicly about government harassment. Thomas Steinbeck, the author's eldest son, said that
J. Edgar Hoover, director of the
FBI at the time, could find no basis for prosecuting Steinbeck and therefore used his power to encourage the
U.S. Internal Revenue Service to audit Steinbeck's taxes every single year of his life, just to annoy him. According to Thomas, a true artist is one who "without a thought for self, stands up against the stones of condemnation, and speaks for those who are given no real voice in the halls of justice, or the halls of government. By doing so these people will naturally become the enemies of the political status quo."
In a 1942 letter to United States Attorney General Francis Biddle, he wrote: "Do you suppose you could ask Edgar's boys to stop stepping on my heels? They think I am an enemy alien. It is getting tiresome." The FBI denied that Steinbeck was under investigation.
Major works
Of Mice and Men
Of Mice and Men is a tragedy that was written in the form of a play in 1937. The story is about two traveling ranch workers, George and Lennie, trying to work up enough money to buy their own farm/ranch. It encompasses themes of racism, loneliness, prejudice against the mentally ill, and the struggle for personal independence. Along with
Grapes of Wrath,
East of Eden, and
The Pearl,
Of Mice and Men is one of Steinbeck's best known works. It was made into a movie three times,
in 1939 starring
Burgess Meredith,
Lon Chaney Jr., and
Betty Field, in 1982 starring
Randy Quaid,
Robert Blake and
Ted Neeley, and in
1992 starring
Gary Sinise and
John Malkovich.
The Grapes of Wrath
The
Grapes of Wrath was written in 1939 and won the
Pulitzer Prize in 1940. The book is set in the
Great Depression and describes a family of sharecroppers, the Joads, who were driven from their land due to the dust storms of the
Dust Bowl. The title is a reference to the
Battle Hymn of the Republic. The book was unpopular amongst some critics who found it too sympathetic to the worker's plight and too critical of aspects of capitalism; but it found quite a large audience amongst the working class. The book was made into a
film in 1940 starring
Henry Fonda and directed by
John Ford.
East of Eden
Steinbeck deals with the nature of good and evil in this Salinas Valley saga. The story follows two families: the Hamiltons – based on Steinbeck's own maternal ancestry – and the Trasks, reprising stories about the Biblical Adam and his progeny. The book was published in 1952. It was made into a movie in 1955 directed by
Elia Kazan starring
James Dean.
In Dubious Battle
In 1936 Steinbeck published the first of what came to be known as his Dustbowl trilogy, which included
Of Mice and Men and
The Grapes of Wrath. This first novel, considered by many to be among Steinbeck's best, tells the story of a fruit picker's strike in California which is both aided and damaged by the help of "the Party," generally taken to be the
Communist Party, although this is never spelled out in the book.
Travels With Charley
In 1960, Steinbeck bought a pickup truck and had it modified with a custom-built
camper top – which was rare at the time – and drove across the United States with his faithful 'blue'
standard poodle, Charley. Steinbeck nicknamed his truck
Rocinante after
Don Quixote's "noble steed". In this sometimes comical, sometimes melancholic book, Steinbeck describes what he sees from
Maine to
Montana to California, and from there to Texas and
Louisiana and back to his home on
Long Island. The restored camper truck is on exhibit in the
National Steinbeck Center in Salinas.
Bibliography
(1927)
The Pastures of Heaven (1932)
The Red Pony (1933)
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)
Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research (1941)
The Moon Is Down (1942)
(1942)
Cannery Row (1945)
The Wayward Bus (1947)
The Pearl (1947)
A Russian Journal (1948)
Burning Bright (1950)
The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951)
East of Eden (1952)
Sweet Thursday (1954)
The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957)
Once There Was A War (1958)
The Winter of Our Discontent (1961)
(1962)
America and Americans (1966)
(1969)
Viva Zapata! (1975)
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976)
(1989)
Filmography
1939—Of Mice and Men—directed by Lewis Milestone, featuring Burgess Meredith, Lon Chaney, Jr., and Betty Field
1940—The Grapes of Wrath—directed by John Ford, featuring Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell and John Carradine
1941—The Forgotten Village—directed by Alexander Hammid and Herbert Kline, narrated by Burgess Meredith, music by Hanns Eisler
1942—Tortilla Flat—directed by Victor Fleming, featuring Spencer Tracy, Hedy Lamarr and John Garfield
1943—The Moon is Down—directed by Irving Pichel, featuring Lee J. Cobb and Sir Cedric Hardwicke
1944—Lifeboat—directed by Alfred Hitchcock, featuring Tallulah Bankhead, Hume Cronyn, and John Hodiak
1944—A Medal for Benny—directed by Irving Pichel, featuring Dorothy Lamour and Arturo de Cordova
1947—La Perla (The Pearl, Mexico)—directed by Emilio Fernández, featuring Pedro Armendáriz and María Elena Marqués
1949—The Red Pony—directed by Lewis Milestone, featuring Myrna Loy, Robert Mitchum, and Louis Calhern
1952—Viva Zapata!—directed by Elia Kazan, featuring Marlon Brando, Anthony Quinn and Jean Peters
1955—East of Eden—directed by Elia Kazan, featuring James Dean, Julie Harris, Jo Van Fleet, and Raymond Massey
1957—The Wayward Bus—directed by Victor Vicas, featuring Rick Jason, Jayne Mansfield, and Joan Collins
1961—Flight—featuring Efrain Ramírez and Arnelia Cortez
1962—Ikimize bir dünya (Of Mice and Men, Turkey)
1972—Topoli (Of Mice and Men, Iran)
1982—Cannery Row—directed by David S. Ward, featuring Nick Nolte and Debra Winger
1992—Of Mice and Men—directed by Gary Sinise and starring John Malkovich and Gary Sinise
See Also
Pigasus - a personal stamp used by Steinback
Notes
References
DeMott, Robert and Steinbeck, Elaine A., eds. John Steinbeck, Novels and Stories 1932–1937 (Library of America, 1994) ISBN 978-1-88301101-7
DeMott, Robert and Steinbeck, Elaine A., eds. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath and Other Writings 1936–1941 (Library of America, 1996) ISBN 978-1-88301115-4
DeMott, Robert, ed. John Steinbeck, Novels 1942–1952 (Library of America, 2002) ISBN 978-1-93108207-5
DeMott, Robert and Railsback, Brian, eds. John Steinbeck, Travels With Charlie and later novels, 1947–1962 (Library of America, 2007) ISBN 978-1-59853-004-9
Benson, Jackson J., ed. The Short Novels Of John Steinbeck: Critical Essays with a Checklist to Steinbeck Criticism. Durham: Duke UP, 1990. PS3537 .T3234 Z8666
Davis, Robert C. The Grapes of Wrath: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1982. PS3537 .T3234 G734
French, Warren. John Steinbeck's Fiction Revisited. NY: Twayne, 1994.
Hughes, R. S. John Steinbeck: A Study of the Short Fiction. R.S. Hughes. Boston : Twayne, 1989. PS3537 .T3234 Z7147
Meyer, Michael J. The Hayashi Steinbeck Bibliography, 1982–1996. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 1998.
Benson, Jackson J. Looking for Steinbeck's Ghost. Reno: U of Nevada P, 2002.
Ditsky, John. John Steinbeck and the Critics. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000.
Heavilin, Barbara A. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath: A Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002.
Li, Luchen. ed. John Steinbeck: A Documentary Volume. Detroit: Gale, 2005.
Parini, Jay,. John Steinbeck: A Biography, , Holt Publishing, 1996.
Robison, Bruce, "Mavericks on Cannery Row," American Scientist, vol. 92, no. 6 (November–December 2004, p. 1: a review of Eric Enno Tamm, Beyond the Outer Shores: The Untold Odyssey of Ed Ricketts, the Pioneering Ecologist who Inspired John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell, Four Walls Eight Windows, 2004.
Steinbeck, John Steinbeck IV and Nancy (2001). The Other Side of Eden: Life with John Steinbeck Prometheus Books. ISBN 1573928585
Tamm, Eric Enno (2005) Beyond the Outer Shores: The Untold Odyssey of Ed Ricketts, the Pioneering Ecologist who Inspired John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell Thunder's Mouth Press. ISBN 9781560256892.
External links
National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, CA
John Steinbeck Collection at Ball State University Archives and Special Collections
The Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at the San José State University
searchable database of secondary Steinbeck materials
C-Span American Writers Series
Steinbeck's fiction on IBList
John Steinbeck Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at
The University of Texas at Austin
FBI file on John Steinbeck
FBI file at The Smoking Gun
Nobel Laureate page
Homepage for the Steinbeck House
A Tour of John Steinbeck's "Valley of the World"
Steinbeck’s Summer Home – slideshow by The New York Times
John Steinbeck Collection, 1902–1979(call number M0263; 8.50 linear ft.) and Wells Fargo John Steinbeck Collection, 1870–1981(call number M1063; 5 linear ft.) are housed in the Department of Special Collections and University Archives at Stanford University Libraries
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Category:American Nobel laureates
Category:American novelists
Category:American short story writers
Category:Writers from California
Category:Nobel laureates in Literature
Category:People from Salinas, California
Category:People of the New Deal arts projects
Category:Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
Category:Pulitzer Prize for the Novel winners
Category:American writers of German descent
Category:American writers of Irish descent
Category:Stanford University alumni
Category:1902 births
Category:1968 deaths
Category:20th-century novelists
Category:Recipients of King Haakon VII's Cross of Liberty
