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)