John Steinbeck

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John Ernst Steinbeck Jr. (February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) was an American author.

"For his realistic and imaginative writings, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962," he wrote, "integrating sympathetic humour and keen social awareness." During his writing career, he has published 33 books, including 16 novels, six non-fiction books, and two collections of short stories.

He is best known for his comic books Tortilla Flat (1935) and Cannery Row (1945), the multi-generation epic East of Eden (1952), and the novellas Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Red Pony (1937).

The Grapes of Wrath (1939), a Pulitzer Prize winner, is considered Steinbeck's masterpiece and a component of the American literary canon.

It has sold 14 million copies in central California, particularly in the Salinas Valley and the California Coast Ranges area, 75 years since it was first published.

His works often explored the concepts of fate and injustice, particularly as applied to downtrodden or everyman protagonists.

Early life

Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California, on February 27, 1902. He was of German, English, and Irish descent. Johann Adolf Großsteinbeck (1828–1913), Steinbeck's paternal grandfather, was a founder of Mount Hope, a short-lived messianic farming colony in Palestine that disbanded after attackers killed his brother and assaulted his brother's sister and mother-in-law. He immigrated to the United States in 1858, changing the family name to Steinbeck. The family farm in Heiligenhaus, Mettmann, Germany, is still named "Großsteinbeck."

John Ernst Steinbeck (1862–1935), his father, was Monterey County treasurer. Olive Hamilton (1867-1934), a former school counselor, shared Steinbeck's obsession with reading and writing, according to John's mother. The Steinbecks were members of the Episcopal Church, but Steinbeck later became agnostic, but the Steinbecks became agnostic. Steinbeck lived in a small rural valley (no more than a frontier settlement) set in some of the world's most fertile soil, about 25 miles from the Pacific Coast. Both the valley and the coast will be used to create some of his best stories. He spent his summers on nearby ranches, including the Post Ranch in Big Sur. On Spreckels sugar beet farms, he later worked with migrant workers. He learned of the more difficult aspects of migration and the darker side of human nature, which supplied him with a variety of articles in Of Mice and Men. He explored his surroundings, strolling through local forests, fields, and farms. He wrote at Spreckels Sugar Company when he was working in their laboratory, which gave him time to write. He had a natural aptitude and a penchant for restoring 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 travelled to New York City, where he did odd jobs while trying to write. When he didn't get published, he returned to California and worked as a tour guide and caretaker at Lake Tahoe, where he first married Carol Henning, his first wife. They married in Los Angeles in 1930, where he and friends attempted to make money by making plaster mannequins.

Steinbeck and Carol went back to Pacific Grove, California, a few blocks outside the Monterey city limits, six months after they had to leave due to a slow market. The elder Steinbecks gave John free housing, paper for his manuscripts, and loans that allowed him to write without looking for work from 1928 to 1928. Steinbeck bought a small boat and later said he was able to survive on the fish and crabs he gathered from the sea, as well as fresh vegetables from his garden and local farms during the Great Depression. Steinbeck and his wife accepted welfare, and on rare occasions, stole bacon from the local produce market, when those sources failed. Whatever food they had, they shared with their families. In Steinbeck's book Cannery Row, Carol became Mary Talbot's model.

Steinbeck met Ed Ricketts, a marine biologist who became a close friend and mentor to Steinbeck over the following decade, who taught him a great deal about philosophy and biology in 1930. Ricketts, who are often quiet, yet likable, with an inner voice of insufficiency and an encyclopedic knowledge of a variety of topics, became a focus of Steinbeck's interest. Ricketts had attended a college class taught by Warder Clyde Allee, a biologist and ecologist who would later write a classic early textbook on ecology. Ricketts became a proponent of ecological thinking, although he was just one of a large chain of beings entangled in a web of life too large for him to control or comprehend. Ricketts, in the meantime, ran a Monterey bio lab that sold biological samples of small animals, fish, rays, starfish, turtles, and other marine forms to schools and colleges.

Steinbeck and Ricketts became close friends between 1930 and 1936. Steinbeck's wife started working at the lab as the lab's secretary-bookkeeper. Steinbeck supported on an informal basis. They developed a shared passion for music and art, and John learned biology and Ricketts' ecological philosophy. Ricketts also performed music for him when Steinbeck was physically ill.

Personal life

In Los Angeles, Steinbeck and his first wife, Carol Henning, married in January 1930. They were starting to suffer by 1940, and they came a year later in 1941. Steinbeck married Gwyndolyn "Gwyn" Conger in 1942, following his divorce from Carol. Thomas ("Thom") Steinbeck (1944–2016) and John Steinbeck IV (1946–1991) were two sons of Steinbeck's second wife.

Steinbeck and his companion Ed Ricketts, who had been critically wounded when a train collided his car in May 1948, were returned to California on an emergency trip to see them. Ricketts died just hours before Steinbeck arrived. Steinbeck was confronted by Gwyn, who asked for a divorce that was final in October, when returning home. Steinbeck lived in deep depression a year after Ricketts' death.

Steinbeck met stage-manager Elaine Scott at a restaurant in Carmel, California, in June 1949. Steinbeck and Scott began dating in December 1950, just weeks after the finalizing of Scott's own divorce from actor Zachary Scott. Steinbeck's third marriage didn't last until his death in 1968. Steinbeck, a Californian neighbor, was also an acquaintance with contemporary poet Robinson Jeffers. "Robinson Jeffers and his wife called the other day to call Elizabeth Otis," Steinbeck wrote in a Letter to Elizabeth Otis. He may be a little older, but that is all. "She is just the same."

Steinbeck first appeared as friend and mentor to young writer and naturalist Jack Rudloe, who was planning to establish his own biological supply business, now Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory in Florida. They remained in touch until Steinbeck's death.

Steinbeck came to Tel Aviv in 1966 to visit Mount Hope, a farm community established in Israel by his grandfather, whose brother, Friedrich Großsteinbeck, was assassinated by Arab marauders in 1858, which became known as the Outrages at Jaffa.

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Career

Cup of Gold, Steinbeck's first book, was loosely based on Henry Morgan's life and death. It revolves around Morgan's shaming and dismissal of Panamá Viejo, also known as the "Cup of Gold," and the women, who were believed to be more brilliant than the sun, who were reported to be present there. Steinbeck wrote a werewolf murder mystery in 1930, but it has never been published because Steinbeck thought it was unworthy of publication.

Steinbeck produced three shorter works between 1930 and 1933. The Pastures of Heaven, which was published in 1932, is a series of twelve interconnected stories about a valley near Monte whose occupants were discovered by a Spanish corporal while searching runaway Indian slaves. Steinbeck wrote The Red Pony, a 100-page, four-chapter book woven in memories of Steinbeck's childhood. The life of a homesteader and his family in California depicts a man with a primal and pagan worship of the land he works. Despite the fact that he had not earned the reputation of a well-known author, he had no doubt that he would achieve greatness.

Steinbeck's first critical success with Tortilla Flat (1935), a novel set in Monterey, California, which received the California Commonwealth Club's Gold Medal. It tells the tales of a group of classless and often homeless young men in Monterey after World War I, well before US prohibition. They are depicted in a mocking comparison to mythic knights on a quest for a life of dissolute enjoyment of wine, lust, camaraderie, and petty theft in the enjoyment of a dissolute life of a dissolute life dedicated to wine, lust, camaraderie, and petty theft. The Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize to Steinbeck in 1962. "Spicy and humourous tales about a band of paisanos, a social group whose wild revelries are virtually caricatures of King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table are included in "Surrections of King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table." This book, it has been reported, in the United States, it was a welcome antidote to the drudge of the then-prevailing depression. Spencer Tracy, Hedy Lamarr, and John Garfield, a friend of Steinbeck, were all adapted to Tortilla Flat in 1942. He built a summer ranch-home in Los Gatos with a portion of the funds earned.

Steinbeck began writing a series of "California novels" and Dust Bowl stories set among common people during the Great Depression. In the gruesome war, Of Mice and Men, and The Grapes of Wrath, there were several. For the San Francisco News, he wrote an article series called The Harvest Gypsies about the plight of the migrant worker.

In California, Mice and Men was a tragedy about two migrant agricultural laborers' aspirations. It was highly lauded, and Steinbeck's 1962 Nobel Prize citation called it a "little masterpiece." Wallace Ford was starring George and Broderick Crawford as George and Broderick Crawford, George's companion, but Lennie, the physically fit itinerant farmhand, was a hit on stage. Steinbeck refused to travel from California to attend any performance of the play in New York, after director George S. Kaufman announced that the performance was "perfect" and that everything on stage would only be a disappointment. Steinbeck wrote two more stage plays (The Moon Is Down and Burning Bright).

Of Mice and Men was also released as a 1939 Hollywood film starring Lon Chaney, Jr. (he had performed Lennie in the Los Angeles stage production) and Burgess Meredith as George. Meredith and Steinbeck remained close friends for the next two decades. Gary Sinise plays George and John Malkovich as Lennie in a 1992 film based on the novella.

Steinbeck's success with The Grapes of Wrath (1939), based on newspaper articles about migrant agricultural workers that he had written in San Francisco, was continued. It is often thought of as his best work. According to The New York Times, it was the best-selling book of 1939, and over 430,000 copies had been sold by February 1940. Members of the American Booksellers Association announced that it had earned the National Book Award, 1939's most popular fiction book, in the country's month. Fonda was nominated for the best actor Academy Award later this year and was adapted as a film directed by John Ford starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad; later that year, it was voted for the best actor Academy Award. Grapes were contentious. Steinbeck's New Deal political convictions, negative representation of certain aspects of capitalism, and concern for workers' plight sparked a backlash against him, especially near home. The Kern County Board of Supervisors banned the book from the county's publicly funded schools and libraries in August 1939, citing both obscene and misrepresented conditions. This ban did not apply until January 1941.

"The vilification of me out here from the major landowners and bankers is really sad," Steinbeck wrote. The latest is a rumors that the Okies dislike me and have threatened to murder me for lying about them. I'm afraid of this damned thing's rolling cane. It's completely out of hand; I mean, a book's hysteria is growing in a way that is not healthy."

Both the film versions of The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men (by two separate film 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 influenced Steinbeck's writing in the 1930s and 1940s. Steinbeck and Ricketts went on short trips along the California coast to take time off from writing and collecting biological specimens, which Ricketts sold for a living. Sea of Cortez (December 1941), their coauthored book about a collecting expedition to the Gulf of California in 1940, which was part of travelogue and part natural history, never found a following and did not sell well. Steinbeck republished The Log from the Sea of Cortez under his name only in 1951 (though Ricketts had written some of it). This piece is also in print today.

Even though Carol accompanied Steinbeck on the trip, their marriage was beginning to fail and came a year later, in 1941, even as Steinbeck worked on the book's manuscript. He married Gwyndolyn "Gwyn" Conger in 1942, shortly after his separation from Carol.

Ricketts was Steinbeck's model for "Doc" in Cannery Row (1945) and Sweet Thursday (1954), "Friend Ed" in Burning Bright (1954), and the characters in In Dubious Battle (1936) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939). In Steinbeck's earlier books of the period, ecological themes resurfaced.

Steinbeck's close friendship with Ricketts came to an end in 1941 when Steinbeck moved away from Pacific Grove and divorced his wife Carol. Except for East of Eden (1952), Steinbeck's writing declined after Ricketts' premature death in 1948. Ricketts' biographer Eric Enno Tamm opined that.

The Moon Is Down (1942), Steinbeck's book about the Socrates-inspired spirit of resistance in an occupied village in Northern Europe, was turned into a film almost immediately. It was assumed that the unidentified country of the novel was Norway and the Germans, who had taken it. Steinbeck was awarded the King Haakon VII Freedom Cross in 1945 for his literary contributions to the Norwegian resistance movement.

Steinbeck, a World War II war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, spent time in Washington, New York, and with the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the CIA). It was at that time that Will Lang, Jr. of Time/Life magazine became a colleague. During the conflict, Steinbeck was accompanied by David Warren, Jr.'s Beach Jumpers program, which began small-unit diversion operations against German-controlled islands in the Mediterranean. At one point, he accompanied Fairbanks on an island off the coast of Italy and used a Thompson submachine rifle to capture Italian and German prisoners. Some of his writings from this period were included in the film "There Was a War (1958).

Steinbeck recovered from war with a variety of injuries from shrapnel and other psychological traumas. He wrote about himself as well as writing. Lifeboat (1944), Alfred Hitchcock's film, and Benny (1945), screenwriter Jack Wagner, A Medal for Benny (1945), about paisanos from Tortilla Flat going to war. He later requested that his name be deleted from the Lifeboat credits because he felt that the last version of the film had racist undertones. Cannery Row (1945), the book's setting, was renamed Cannery Row in 1944, suffering from homesickness for his Pacific Grove/Monterey life of the 1930s.

He wrote The Pearl (1947), knowing that it would be shot eventually. "The Pearl of the World" appeared in the Woman's Home Companion magazine's December 1945 issue as "The Pearl of the World." It was designed by John Alan Maxwell. Steinbeck's book is an imaginative retelling of a tale that he encountered in La Paz in 1940 as part of The Log From the Sea of Cortez, which he described in Chapter 11 as "so much like a parable that it almost can't be." Steinbeck and Wagner accompanied the script in Cuernava, Mexico; on this trip, he would be inspired by Emiliano Zapata's story and scripted a film script (Viva Zapata!) Elia Kazan's directed Marlon Brando and Anthony Quinn, starring Marlon Brando and Anthony Quinn.

Steinbeck made his first trip to the Soviet Union in 1947 with photographer Robert Capa. They travelled to Moscow, Kyiv, Tbilisi, Batumi, and Stalingrad, some of the first Americans to visit many parts of the USSR after the communist revolution. Capa's photograph illustrated Steinbeck's 1948 book about their experiences, A Russian Journal. Steinbeck was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1948, the year the book was published.

East of Eden, Steinbeck's longest book, was published in 1952. According to Elaine, his third wife, he regarded it as his magnum opus, his best book.

In 1952, John Steinbeck appeared as the on-screen narrator of O. Henry's Full House. Despite the fact that Steinbeck later confessed to being uncomfortable before the camera, he did a good job with several filmed adaptations of short stories by O. Henry's legendary writer O. Henry. Steinbeck also recorded readings of several of his short stories for Columbia Records; the albums serve as a record of Steinbeck's deep, resonant voice.

Steinbeck co-produced with Kazan on the 1955 film East of Eden, James Dean's first film appearance after the success of Viva Zapata!

Steinbeck and his third wife Elaine rented a cottage in Discove, Redlynch, Somerset, England, from March to October 1959, while Steinbeck researched his retelling of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. From the cottage, Glastonbury Tor was visible, and Steinbeck paid a visit to Cadbury Castle, the alleged court of King Arthur's Camelot. The unfinished manuscript was published after his death in 1976 as The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights. The Steinbecks recalled that the time they spent in Somerset was the best of their lives together.

In Search of America: Charley is a traveller from his 1960 road trip with his poodle Charley. Steinbeck mourns his lost youth and roots, though dispensing with both critique and praise for the United States. Steinbeck's uncle, Thom, was on the trip because he knew he was dying and wanted to see the country for the last time.

The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Steinbeck's last book, delves into the United States' moral decline. Ethan, the protagonist, is dissatisfied with his own moral decline and the lives of those around him. The book has a very different tone from Steinbeck's earlier books, such as Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row, which have a distinct amoral and ecological stance. It wasn't a critical success. Many reviewers understood the importance of the book, but were disappointed that it wasn't another Grapes of Wrath. However, the Swedish Academy cited it most favorably in the Nobel Prize presentation address next year: "Here, he met the same high as he set in The Grapes of Wrath." He maintains his role as an outsider of the truth with an unbiased intuition for what is true or false."

Steinbeck remained no more fiction in the remaining six years before his death, owing to his critical reception of this book and the widespread outcry when he was named the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.

Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962 for his "realistic and imaginative writing," as well as sympathetic humor and keen social perception. In one Swedish newspaper, the selection was largely criticized and described as "one of the academy's biggest mistakes." The reaction of American literary critics was also sarcastic. The New York Times inquired why the Nobel committee gave the award to an author whose "limited skill is, in his best books, dragged down by tenth-rate philosophising," noting that "the international character of the award and the weight attached to it raise concerns about the mechanics of selection and how close the Nobel committee is to the main currents of American literature. [W]e think it's important that the laurel was not given to a writer... whose fame, clout, and sheer body of work had already left a more lasting impression on the literature of our time.' "Frankly, no," Steinbeck replied on the day of the award's announcement. "[T]his opulence was one of the few in the world where one could not buy nor gain by political manipulation," Biographer Jackson Benson writes. It was precisely because the committee voted on its own terms rather than plugging into "the main currents of American writing" as defined by the scholarly institution that the award had value." He said: In his acceptance address later this year in Stockholm, he said: "Italian people are born in Sweden."

Steinbeck was a "compromise pick" among a shortlist containing Steinbeck, British authors Robert Graves and Lawrence Durrell, French dramatist Jean Anouilh, and Danish author Karen Blixen, fifty years ago, in 2012. He was chosen as the best of a bad lot by declassified papers, according to declassified reports. "There aren't any obvious contenders for the Nobel prize, and the prize committee is in an unenviable situation," committee member Henry Olsson wrote. Despite the fact that Steinbeck's best work was behind him by 1962, committee member Anders'sterling's response to his book "The Winter of Our Discontent" revealed that "Steinbeck has" revived his position as a social truthteller [and is fully equal to his predecessors Sinclair Lewis and Ernest Hemingway."

Steinbeck, who was modest about his own writing abilities, spoke openly about his own admiration of such writers. He wrote in 1953 that he thinks cartoonist Al Capp, the writer of the satirical Li'l Abner, is "possibly the best writer in the country today." He was asked his favorite authors and works at his first Nobel Prize press conference and replied: "Hemingway's short stories and almost every Faulkner wrote" he said.

President Lyndon B. Johnson honoured Steinbeck with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in September 1964.

Steinbeck went to Vietnam in 1967 to cover the conflict at the height of Newsday magazine. He regarded the Vietnam War as a heroic effort and was regarded as a hawk for his service on the war. Both his sons were active in Vietnam before his death, and Steinbeck visited one son in the war. At one time, he was allowed to work a machine-gun watch at a firebase all night while his son and other members of his platoon slept.

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