John Steinbeck: the story on HearLore

John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck was born on the 27th of February 1902 in Salinas, California, a small rural valley set in fertile soil about 25 miles from the Pacific Coast. His family history was rooted in a violent past; his paternal grandfather, Johann Adolf Großsteinbeck, founded a short-lived farming colony in Palestine that disbanded after Arab attackers killed his brother and raped his brother's wife and mother-in-law. This grandfather arrived in the United States in 1858, shortening the family name to Steinbeck, and the family farm in Heiligenhaus, Germany, remains named Großsteinbeck. Steinbeck grew up in a frontier settlement where both the valley and the coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. He spent his summers working on nearby ranches including the Post Ranch in Big Sur and later labored with migrant workers on Spreckels sugar beet farms. There he learned of the harsher aspects of the migrant life and the darker side of human nature, which supplied him with material expressed in Of Mice and Men. He explored his surroundings, walking across local forests, fields, and farms, and while working at the Spreckels Sugar Company, he sometimes worked in their laboratory, which gave him time to write. He had considerable mechanical aptitude and a fondness for repairing things he owned. Steinbeck graduated from Salinas High School in 1919 and went on to study English literature at Stanford University near Palo Alto, leaving without a degree in 1925. He traveled to New York City where he took odd jobs while trying to write. When he failed to publish his work, he returned to California and worked in 1928 as a tour guide and caretaker at Lake Tahoe, where he met Carol Henning, his first wife. They married in January 1930 in Los Angeles, where, with friends, he attempted to make money by manufacturing plaster mannequins. When their money ran out six months later due to a slow market, Steinbeck and Carol moved back to Pacific Grove, California, to a cottage owned by his father, on the Monterey Peninsula a few blocks outside the Monterey city limits. The elder Steinbecks gave John free housing, paper for his manuscripts, and from 1928, loans that allowed him to write without looking for work. During the Great Depression, Steinbeck bought a small boat, and later claimed that he was able to live on the fish and crabs that he gathered from the sea, and fresh vegetables from his garden and local farms. When those sources failed, Steinbeck and his wife accepted welfare, and on rare occasions, stole bacon from the local produce market. Whatever food they had, they shared with their friends. Carol became the model for Mary Talbot in Steinbeck's novel Cannery Row.

The Ecological Mind

In 1930, Steinbeck met the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, who became a close friend and mentor to Steinbeck during the following decade, teaching him a great deal about philosophy and biology. Ricketts, usually very quiet, yet likable, with an inner self-sufficiency and an encyclopedic knowledge of diverse subjects, became a focus of Steinbeck's attention. Ricketts had taken a college class from Warder Clyde Allee, a biologist and ecological theorist, who would go on to write a classic early textbook on ecology. Ricketts became a proponent of ecological thinking, in which man was only one part of a great chain of being, caught in a web of life too large for him to control or understand. Meanwhile, Ricketts operated a biological lab on the coast of Monterey, selling biological samples of small animals, fish, rays, starfish, turtles, and other marine forms to schools and colleges. Between 1930 and 1936, Steinbeck and Ricketts became close friends. Steinbeck's wife began working at the lab as secretary-bookkeeper. Steinbeck helped on an informal basis. They formed a common bond based on their love of music and art, and John learned biology and Ricketts's ecological philosophy. When Steinbeck became emotionally upset, Ricketts sometimes played music for him. 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 himself time off from his writing and to collect biological specimens, which Ricketts sold for a living. Their coauthored book, Sea of Cortez, published in December 1941, about a collecting expedition to the Gulf of California in 1940, which was part travelogue and part natural history, never found an audience and did not sell well. 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 and Sweet Thursday, Friend Ed in Burning Bright, and characters in In Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath. 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 his wife Carol. Ricketts's biographer Eric Enno Tamm opined that, except for East of Eden, Steinbeck's writing declined after Ricketts's untimely death in 1948. In May 1948, Steinbeck returned to California on an emergency trip to be with his friend Ed Ricketts, who had been seriously injured when a train struck his car. Ricketts died hours before Steinbeck arrived. Upon returning home, Steinbeck was confronted by Gwyn, who asked for a divorce, which became final in October. Steinbeck spent the year after Ricketts's death in deep depression.

When was John Steinbeck born and where did he grow up?

John Steinbeck was born on the 27th of February 1902 in Salinas, California. He grew up in a frontier settlement in a small rural valley set in fertile soil about 25 miles from the Pacific Coast.

Who was Ed Ricketts and how did he influence John Steinbeck?

Ed Ricketts was a marine biologist who became a close friend and mentor to John Steinbeck during the 1930s and 1940s. Ricketts taught Steinbeck about philosophy and biology, and his ecological thinking strongly influenced Steinbeck's writing and characters in novels like Cannery Row and The Grapes of Wrath.

What major awards did John Steinbeck receive during his lifetime?

John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in September 1964. He also received the King Haakon VII Freedom Cross in 1945 for his literary contributions to the Norwegian resistance movement.

When did John Steinbeck die and what caused his death?

John Steinbeck died in New York City on the 20th of December 1968 during the 1968 flu pandemic. His death was caused by heart disease and congestive heart failure, with an autopsy showing nearly complete occlusion of the main coronary arteries.

Which books by John Steinbeck have been banned and why?

The Grapes of Wrath was banned in August 1939 by the Kern County Board of Supervisors for its negative portrayal of capitalism and sympathy for workers. Of Mice and Men has been removed from English Literature GCSE syllabi in Wales and England due to concerns about racist language, and The Grapes of Wrath was banned in Mississippi in 2003 for profanity.

The Grapes Of Wrath

Steinbeck began to write a series of California novels and Dust Bowl fiction, set among common people during the Great Depression. These included In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. He also wrote an article series called The Harvest Gypsies for the San Francisco News about the plight of the migrant worker. Of Mice and Men was a drama about the dreams of two migrant agricultural laborers in California. Steinbeck, on vacations to Mexico, witnessed sold-out theater troupes with often poor and illiterate workers consisting of the audience. As such, Steinbeck chose to write Of Mice and Men with a stage play in mind. It was critically acclaimed and Steinbeck's 1962 Nobel Prize citation called it a little masterpiece. Its stage production was a hit, starring Wallace Ford as George and Broderick Crawford as George's companion, the mentally childlike, but physically powerful itinerant farmhand Lennie. Steinbeck refused to travel from his home in California to attend any performance of the play during its New York run, telling 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. Steinbeck followed this wave of success with The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1939, based on newspaper articles about migrant agricultural workers that he had written in San Francisco. In August 1936, the San Francisco News asked Steinbeck to personally interview multiple families in the impoverished Hoovervilles of the San Joaquin Valley. As Steinbeck visited the slums that hugged the highways across the Central Valley, he was harrowed by what he saw. He talked with multiple families and vowed to make a book depicting their struggles. It is commonly considered his greatest work. According to The New York Times, it was the best-selling book of 1939 and 430,000 copies had been printed by February 1940. In that month, it won the National Book Award, favorite fiction book of 1939, voted by members of the American Booksellers Association. Later that year, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Grapes was controversial. 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 for displaying communist views, especially in his hometown of Salinas. Steinbeck received so many threats that he purchased a handgun for his own safety. Claiming the book both was 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 then First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, already a fan of Steinbeck's work from Of Mice and Men, defended Steinbeck's work in her nationally syndicated newspaper column, My Day. She wrote: Now I must tell you that I have just finished a book which is an unforgettable experience in reading. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, both repels and attracts you. The horrors of the picture, so well drawn, make you dread sometimes to begin the next chapter, and yet you cannot lay the book down or even skip a page. After visiting California labor camps in 1940, a reporter asked her if she believed that The Grapes of Wrath was exaggerated. Roosevelt responded, I have never believed that The Grapes of Wrath was exaggerated.

War Correspondent

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. 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. At one point, he accompanied 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. Some of his writings from this period were incorporated in the documentary Once There Was a War. 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 movie, Lifeboat, and with screenwriter Jack Wagner, A Medal for Benny, 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, bruised, battered, and homesick, Steinbeck wrote Cannery Row, 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. Steinbeck's novel The Moon Is Down, 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 Germans. In 1945, Steinbeck received the King Haakon VII Freedom Cross for his literary contributions to the Norwegian resistance movement. After the war, he wrote The Pearl, knowing it would be filmed eventually. Steinbeck's relationship with Hollywood had solidified to the point where his books were being green-lit as movies as they released. 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 Cuernavaca, 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. In 1947, Steinbeck made his first trip to the Soviet Union with photographer Robert Capa. They visited Moscow, Kyiv, Tbilisi, Batumi and Stalingrad, some of the first Americans to visit many parts of the USSR since the communist revolution. Steinbeck's 1948 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.

The Nobel Choice

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. The selection was heavily criticized, and described as one of the Academy's biggest mistakes in one Swedish newspaper. The reaction of American literary critics was also harsh. The New York Times asked why the Nobel committee gave the award to an author whose limited talent is, in his best books, watered down by tenth-rate philosophising, noting that the international character of the award and the weight attached to it raise questions about the mechanics of selection and how close the Nobel committee is to the main currents of American writing. Steinbeck, when asked on the day of the announcement if he deserved the Nobel, replied: Frankly, no. Biographer Jackson Benson notes, this honor was one of the few in the world that one could not buy nor gain by political maneuver. It was precisely because the committee made its judgment on its own criteria, rather than plugging into the main currents of American writing as defined by the critical establishment, that the award had value. In his acceptance speech later in the year in Stockholm, he said: Fifty years later, in 2012, the Nobel Prize opened its archives and it was revealed that Steinbeck was a compromise choice among a shortlist consisting of Steinbeck, British authors Robert Graves and Lawrence Durrell, French dramatist Jean Anouilh and Danish author Karen Blixen. The declassified documents showed that 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. Although the committee believed Steinbeck's best work was behind him by 1962, committee member Anders Österling believed the release of his novel The Winter of Our Discontent showed that after some signs of slowing down in recent years, Steinbeck has regained his position as a social truth-teller and is an authentic realist fully equal to his predecessors Sinclair Lewis and Ernest Hemingway. Although modest about his own talent as a writer, Steinbeck talked openly of his own admiration of certain writers. In 1953, he wrote that he considered cartoonist Al Capp, creator of the satirical Li'l Abner, possibly the best writer in the world today. 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 September 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded Steinbeck the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The Road Trip

Over the course of 276 days in 1952, Steinbeck wrote the first draft of East of Eden, a book he considered his ultimate test as a writer. He wrote a daily letter to his editor while writing the book. Through them, Steinbeck explored himself, his creative process, his love for writing, and his family life, for he had just married his third wife, Elaine Scott, the year prior. Steinbeck, according to Elaine Scott, considered East of Eden his magnum opus, his greatest novel. As the book was released, he wrote to John Beskow, a Swedish artist and a confidant of his: I have put all the things I have wanted to write all my life. This is the book... having done this, I can do anything I want. Also 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; the recordings provide a record of Steinbeck's deep, resonant voice. From March to October 1959, Steinbeck and his third wife Elaine rented a cottage in the hamlet of Discove, Redlynch, near Bruton in Somerset, England, while Steinbeck researched his retelling of the Arthurian legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Glastonbury Tor was visible from the cottage, and Steinbeck also visited the nearby hillfort of Cadbury Castle, the supposed site of King Arthur's court of Camelot. The unfinished manuscript was published after his death in 1976, as The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights. Steinbeck grew up enthralled by the stories of King Arthur, and the Steinbecks recounted the time spent in Somerset as the happiest of their life together. 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 as he travels from Maine to Montana to California, and from there to Texas and Louisiana and back to his home on Long Island. However, in 2011, after his death, a reporter who had followed Travels with Charley's trail using the author's own diaries controverted the book's accuracy, casting Steinbeck's claimed reportage as largely fictionalized, allegations supported by scholars and Steinbeck's son John. Steinbeck's last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent, examines moral decline in the United States. The protagonist Ethan grows discontented with his own moral decline and that of those around him. The book has a very different tone from Steinbeck's amoral and ecological stance in earlier works such as Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row. It was not a critical success. Many reviewers recognized the importance of the novel but were disappointed that it was not another Grapes of Wrath. Apparently taken aback by the critical reception of this novel, and the critical outcry when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, Steinbeck published no more fiction in the remaining six years before his death.

The Final Years

In 1967, at the behest of Newsday magazine, Steinbeck went to Vietnam to report on the war. He thought of the Vietnam War as a heroic venture and was considered a hawk for his position on the war. His sons served in Vietnam before his death, and Steinbeck visited one son in the battlefield. At one point he was allowed to man a machine-gun watch position at night at a firebase while his son and other members of his platoon slept. Steinbeck opposed the anti-war movement in the United States, denouncing the fallout, drop-out, cop-out insurgency of our children and young people, the rush to stimulant as well as hypnotic drugs, the rise of narrow, ugly, and vengeful cults of all kinds, the mistrust and revolt against all authority , this in a time of plenty such as has never been known. Along with Albert Einstein, Steinbeck was one of the sponsors of the Peoples' World Convention, also known as Peoples' World Constituent Assembly, which took place in 1950, 51 at Palais Electoral, Geneva, Switzerland. Steinbeck complained publicly about government harassment. Thomas Steinbeck, the author's eldest son, said that J. Edgar Hoover, the 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, John 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. The FBI denied that Steinbeck was under investigation. Documents released by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2012 indicate that Steinbeck offered his services to the Agency in 1952, while planning a European tour, and the Director of Central Intelligence, Walter Bedell Smith, was eager to take him up on the offer. The correspondence is also available at What work, if any, Steinbeck may have performed for the CIA during the Cold War is unknown. It is also unclear if Steinbeck actually provided any useful information to the CIA. Documents released by the Security Service of Ukraine following the Revolution of Dignity in 2014 indicate that the Soviet KGB suspected him of being an American agent when he visited locations within the USSR, including Kyiv, in 1947. In 1963, Steinbeck visited the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic at the behest of President John F. Kennedy. During his visit he sat for a rare portrait by painter Martiros Saryan and visited Geghard Monastery. He also met with Armenian poet Hovhannes Shiraz in Yerevan. Steinbeck's letter of thanks for Shiraz's hospitality is now displayed at the Shiraz house museum in Gyumri. Footage of this visit filmed by Rafael Aramyan was sold in 2013 by his granddaughter. John Steinbeck died in New York City, where his writing career had begun, on the 20th of December 1968, during the 1968 flu pandemic of heart disease and congestive heart failure. He was 66, and had been a lifelong smoker. An autopsy showed nearly complete occlusion of the main coronary arteries. In accordance with his wishes, his body was cremated, and interred on the 4th of March 1969 at the Hamilton family gravesite in Salinas, with those of his parents and maternal grandparents. His third wife, Elaine, was buried in the plot in 2004. 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. Steinbeck's incomplete novel based on the King Arthur legends of Malory and others, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, was published in 1976. Many of Steinbeck's works are required reading in American high schools. In England, Of Mice and Men was one of the key texts used by the examining body AQA for its English Literature GCSE until its removal from the reformed specification that was first examined in June 2018. Following concerns about racist language used in the book, it was also removed from the English Literature GCSE syllabus in Wales, along with To Kill A Mockingbird, by WJEC. It continues to be studied in Northern Ireland, although calls have also been made for its removal there. 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. Steinbeck's works have also been banned. The Grapes of Wrath was banned in August 1939 by the Kern County Board of Supervisors from the county's publicly funded schools and libraries. It was burned in Salinas on two 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.