John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck once stole bacon from a local produce market to survive. During the Great Depression, he and his first wife lived on fish and crabs he gathered from the sea, vegetables from his garden, and welfare when those sources failed. Whatever food they had, they shared with their friends. This was the man who would win the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, who would be called "a giant of American letters," and whose novel The Grapes of Wrath would sell 14 million copies by the 75th anniversary of its publication. He was born on the 27th of February 1902 in Salinas, California, and died on the 20th of December 1968 in New York City. Across his career he authored 33 books. But the figure behind those numbers is harder to pin down. Why did a man who once joined a Communist organization end up reporting from Vietnam as a hawk? Why did he tell reporters, on the day he won the Nobel, that he did not deserve it? And how did a marine biologist selling starfish from a Monterey lab end up shaping some of the most enduring fiction in America?
Salinas, Monterey, and parts of the San Joaquin Valley became the settings for so many of Steinbeck's stories that the region is now sometimes called "Steinbeck Country." He grew up in California's Salinas Valley, a culturally diverse place with a rich migratory and immigrant history. The valley where he lived was no more than a frontier settlement, set in fertile soil about 25 miles from the Pacific Coast. Both the valley and the coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. As a young man Steinbeck worked the land that would later fill his pages. He spent his summers working on nearby ranches, including the Post Ranch in Big Sur. He later labored with migrant workers on Spreckels sugar beet farms, where he learned the harsher aspects of migrant life and the darker side of human nature. That material would surface in Of Mice and Men. While working at Spreckels Sugar Company, he sometimes worked in their laboratory, which gave him time to write. His paternal grandfather, Johann Adolf Großsteinbeck, had founded Mount Hope, a short-lived farming colony in Palestine that disbanded after Arab attackers killed his brother. He arrived in the United States in 1858 and shortened the family name to Steinbeck. The family farm in Heiligenhaus, Mettmann, Germany, is still named "Großsteinbeck."
In 1930, Steinbeck met the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, who became a close friend and mentor for the following decade. Ricketts operated a biological lab on the coast of Monterey, selling samples of small animals, fish, rays, starfish, turtles, and other marine forms to schools and colleges. He was very quiet yet likable, with an encyclopedic knowledge of diverse subjects. When Steinbeck became emotionally upset, Ricketts sometimes played music for him. They formed a common bond based on their love of music and art, and Steinbeck learned biology and Ricketts's ecological philosophy. Steinbeck's wife began working at the lab as secretary-bookkeeper, while Steinbeck helped on an informal basis. Their friendship produced a book and a parade of fictional characters. Their coauthored Sea of Cortez, published in December 1941, described a collecting expedition to the Gulf of California in 1940. Part travelogue and part natural history, it appeared just as the United States entered World War II, never found an audience, and did not sell well. In 1951, Steinbeck republished the narrative portion as The Log from the Sea of Cortez, under his name only, and that work remains in print today. Ricketts was Steinbeck's model for the character of "Doc" in Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, "Friend Ed" in Burning Bright, and characters in In Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath. In May 1948, a train struck Ricketts's car, and he died hours before Steinbeck arrived at his side. Steinbeck spent the year after his friend's death in deep depression. His biographer Eric Enno Tamm opined that, except for East of Eden, Steinbeck's writing declined after Ricketts's untimely death.
In August 1936, the San Francisco News asked Steinbeck to personally interview families in the impoverished Hoovervilles of the San Joaquin Valley. As he visited the slums that hugged the highways across the Central Valley, he was harrowed by what he saw. He had already written an article series called The Harvest Gypsies for the same paper about the plight of the migrant worker. In 1939, Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath, based on his observations and experiences. The novel describes the Joads, a family of sharecroppers driven from their land by the dust storms of the Dust Bowl, and its title is a reference to the Battle Hymn of the Republic. It was the best-selling book of 1939, and 430,000 copies had been printed by February 1940. That month it won the National Book Award as favorite fiction book of 1939, voted by members of the American Booksellers Association. Later that year it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The book also made Steinbeck a target. Its negative portrayal of aspects of capitalism and its sympathy for workers led to backlash, especially in his hometown of Salinas. Steinbeck received so many threats that he purchased a handgun for his safety. In August 1939, the Kern County Board of Supervisors banned the book from the county's public schools and libraries, a ban that 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." First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt defended his work in her syndicated column "My Day." After visiting California labor camps in 1940, when a reporter asked whether the novel was exaggerated, she replied: "I have never believed that The Grapes of Wrath was exaggerated."
Steinbeck's 1962 Nobel Prize citation called Of Mice and Men a "little masterpiece." Published in 1937 to critical acclaim, the novella followed two traveling ranch workers, George and Lennie, trying to earn enough money to buy their own farm. On vacations to Mexico, Steinbeck had witnessed sold-out theater troupes performing for poor and illiterate workers, and he wrote the book with a stage play in mind. The stage production was a hit, starring Wallace Ford as George and Broderick Crawford as the mentally childlike but physically powerful farmhand Lennie. Steinbeck refused to travel from his home in California to attend any performance during its New York run. He told director George S. Kaufman that the play as it existed in his own mind was "perfect," and that anything presented on stage would only be a disappointment. The story moved easily between mediums. A 1939 Hollywood film cast Lon Chaney Jr. as Lennie and Burgess Meredith as George; Chaney had also filled the role in the Los Angeles stage production. Meredith and Steinbeck became close friends for the next two decades. Another film in 1992 starred Gary Sinise as George and John Malkovich as Lennie. Decades after publication, the book remained one of the ten most frequently read books in public high schools in the United States, according to a study by the Center for the Learning and Teaching of Literature.
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, the predecessor of the CIA. He 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. At one point he joined Fairbanks on an invasion of an island off the coast of Italy and used a Thompson submachine gun to help capture Italian and German prisoners. He returned from the war with shrapnel wounds and psychological trauma, and treated himself, as ever, by writing. His novel The Moon Is Down, about the spirit of resistance in an occupied village in Northern Europe, was made into a film almost immediately. In 1945, Steinbeck received the King Haakon VII Freedom Cross for his contributions to the Norwegian resistance movement. He wrote Alfred Hitchcock's film Lifeboat in 1944, then later requested that his name be removed from the credits because he believed the final version had racist undertones. In 1944, bruised, battered, and homesick, he wrote Cannery Row as a love letter to the city of Monterey. In 1958, Ocean View Avenue in Monterey, the setting of the book, was renamed Cannery Row in his honor.
"Frankly, no," Steinbeck replied when asked on the day of the announcement whether he deserved the Nobel Prize. The 1962 selection was heavily criticized, described as "one of the Academy's biggest mistakes" in one Swedish newspaper, and American literary critics were just as harsh. One major newspaper asked why the committee gave the award to an author whose "limited talent is, in his best books, watered down by tenth-rate philosophising." Fifty years later, in 2012, the Nobel Prize opened its archives and revealed that Steinbeck had been a "compromise choice." The shortlist included British authors Robert Graves and Lawrence Durrell, French dramatist Jean Anouilh, and Danish author Karen Blixen, and the documents showed he was chosen as the best of a bad lot. "There aren't any obvious candidates for the Nobel prize and the prize committee is in an unenviable situation," wrote committee member Henry Olsson. Yet committee member Anders Österling believed the release of The Winter of Our Discontent showed that Steinbeck had "regained his position as a social truth-teller." In his acceptance speech in Stockholm, Steinbeck declared that "a writer who does not believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature." Apparently taken aback by the critical outcry, he published no more fiction in the remaining six years before his death. In September 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
In 1935, Steinbeck joined the League of American Writers, a Communist organization, and was mentored by radical writers Lincoln Steffens and his wife Ella Winter. In 1939, he signed a letter supporting the Soviet invasion of Finland. In June 1957, he took a personal and professional risk by supporting his close associate, the playwright Arthur Miller, when Miller refused to disclose names in the House Un-American Activities Committee trials. Steinbeck called the period one of the "strangest and most frightening times a government and people have ever faced." His later politics confounded his old allies. In 1967, at the behest of Newsday magazine, he went to Vietnam to report on the war, which he thought of as a heroic venture. His sympathetic portrayal of the United States Army led the New York Post to denounce him for betraying his leftist past. His sons served in Vietnam, and at one point he was allowed to man a machine-gun watch position at night at a firebase while his son and platoon slept. Steinbeck himself complained publicly about government harassment. His eldest son, Thomas, said that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, finding no basis for prosecuting Steinbeck, used his power to encourage the Internal Revenue Service to audit Steinbeck's taxes every single year of his life. In a 1942 letter to Attorney General Francis Biddle, Steinbeck 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." Documents released in 2012 indicate that Steinbeck offered his services to the CIA in 1952 while planning a European tour, though what work, if any, he performed remains unknown. He had written to his doctor that he felt deeply "in his flesh" that he would not survive his physical death, and that the biological end of his life was the final end to it.
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Common questions
Who was John Steinbeck and what did he write?
John Steinbeck was an American writer and novelist who lived from 1902 to 1968 and authored 33 books, including 16 novels. He is widely known for Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, East of Eden, Of Mice and Men, and The Grapes of Wrath.
When did John Steinbeck win the Nobel Prize in Literature?
John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, for his realistic and imaginative writings combining sympathetic humor and keen social perception. When asked on the day of the announcement whether he deserved it, he replied, "Frankly, no."
Why was The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck banned?
The Grapes of Wrath was banned in August 1939 by the Kern County Board of Supervisors from the county's public schools and libraries on claims that it was obscene and misrepresented the county. The ban lasted until January 1941.
Who was Ed Ricketts to John Steinbeck?
Ed Ricketts was a marine biologist whom Steinbeck met in 1930, and who became a close friend and mentor for the following decade. Ricketts ran a biological lab on the Monterey coast and was Steinbeck's model for the character "Doc" in Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday.
Where did John Steinbeck grow up and set his stories?
John Steinbeck grew up in California's Salinas Valley and was born in Salinas in 1902. Salinas, Monterey, and parts of the San Joaquin Valley became settings for many of his stories, a region now sometimes called "Steinbeck Country."
How did John Steinbeck die?
John Steinbeck died in New York City on the 20th of December 1968, of heart disease and congestive heart failure during the 1968 flu pandemic. He was 66 and had been a lifelong smoker, and an autopsy showed nearly complete occlusion of the main coronary arteries.