John Steinbeck
Essay Preview: John Steinbeck
Report this essay
John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California in 1902 and attended Stanford University intermittently between 1920 and 1926. Steinbeck did not graduate from Stanford, but instead chose to support himself through manual labor while writing.
Steinbecks first novel, Cup of Gold was published in 1929, and was followed three years later by The Pastures of Heaven and, in 1933, To a God Unknown. However, these first three novels were unsuccessful both critically and commercially. Steinbeck had his first success with Tortilla Flat in 1935, an affectionately told story of Mexican-Americans told with gentle humor. Nevertheless, his subsequent novel, In Dubious Battle (1936) was marked by an unrelenting grimness. This novel is a classic account of a strike by agricultural laborers and a pair of Marxist labor organizers who engineer it, and is the first Steinbeck novel to encompass the striking social commentary of his most notable work. Steinbeck received even greater acclaim for the novella Of Mice and Men (1937), a tragic story about the strange, complex bond between two migrant laborers. His crowning achievement, The Grapes of Wrath, won Steinbeck a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award. It was also adapted into a classic film directed by John Ford that was name one of the American Film Institutes one hundred greatest films. The novel describes the migration of a dispossessed family from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to California and critiques their subsequent exploitation by a ruthless system of agricultural economics.
After the best-selling success of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck went to Mexico to collect marine life with the freelance biologist Edward F. Ricketts, and the two men collaborated in writing Sea of Cortez (1941), a study of the fauna of the Gulf of California. During the second world war, Steinbeck wrote some effective pieces of government propaganda, among them The Moon Is Down (1942), a novel of Norwegians under the Nazis. He also served as a war correspondent. With the end of World War II and the move from the Great Depression to economic prosperity Steinbecks work did soften somewhat. While containing the elements of social criticism that marked his earlier work, the three novels Steinbeck published immediately following the war ? Cannery Row (1945), The Pearl and The Bus (both 1947) were more sentimental and relaxed in approach. Steinbeck also contributed to several screenplays. He wrote the original stories