John Steinbeck - biographical notes
John Ernst Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902 in Salinas, California. He was the third child of John Ernst Steinbeck and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck. His father worked variously as the manager of a flour mill, owner of a food and grain store, at Spreckels sugar plant, and finally, when his son was a teenager, as Treasurer of Monterey County. He taught his son to love the natural world and accept responsibility for his colt - experiences which Steinbeck recalled in the collection of stories called The Red Pony. His mother, on the other hand, instilled a love of books and stories in her son. She read to him so much as a child that by the age of five, he was a fluent reader.
He was given an abridged version of Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, which he later remembered as the first book which was truly 'his own'. This work was to influence him greatly later in life.
Though ahead of his classmates academically, Steinbeck became out of touch with his peers by skipping the fifth grade, meaning that he was a year younger than his classmates throughout his academic career until entering Stanford University in 1919.
At university he chose the courses which he felt would help him to develop as a writer. He earned B's in most classes, but withdrew from a number in which he was failing. All of this meant that he never completed a degree, despite remaining at the university for six years.
He did, however, enjoy the short story clubs and joined an English Club where he met other writers who encouraged him to persevere with his writing. During his summer holidays, he worked as a labourer variously in harvest fields, in a sugar beet factory, and in a laboratory.
He finally dropped out of college in 1925 and went to New York where he worked in construction and later as a journalist for the newspaper The American. He soon returned to California and began work on his first novel - Cup of Gold - while working at a lodge and resort south of Lake Tahoe. Cup of Gold was published in 1929.
In January 1930, Steinbeck married Carol Henning, and settled with her in Pacific Grove, where Steinbeck met Ed Ricketts, who became a close friend and provided inspiration for the character Doc in the novels Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday.
In 1934, Steinbeck won the O. Henry award for the best story of the year.
In 1937, Steinbeck was asked to write a series of articles on farmers who had migrated to California from the Southwest dustbowl for the San Francisco News. It was from this trip that Steinbeck gained inspiration for his novel, The Grapes of Wrath, which was published in 1939 and became an instant bestseller.
Exhausted from the completion of such an epic novel, Steinbecktook some time out to work on other projects, first making a documentary in Hollywood, and then aiding Ed Ricketts in marine biology. When he returned from this hiatus, he learned that The Grapes of Wrath had won the Pulitzer prize. However, his marriage to Carol had become increasingly tense during this time, and they divorced in 1943, leaving Steinbeck to marry Gwendolyn Conger soon afterward.
During the early 1940s, Steinbeck was deeply involved in the war effort as a consultant for government propoganda agencies and the US Air Force.
Steinbeck and Gwyn moved back to Monterey in 1944 and Cannery Row appeared in 1945.
In 1948, Ed Ricketts was killed in a collision between his car and a train. Steinbeck was devastated by this loss, and his marriage was becoming increasingly unstable, so much so that he returned from a short trip to Mexico to find that Gwyn had returned to Los Angeles, taking the couple's sons, Thom and John, with her. They divorced soon after.
After recovering from these losses, Steinbeck married Elaine Scott. They settled in New York and started work on his 'big book' - East of Eden - which was published in 1952.
In the following ten years, Steinbeck embarked on many small, largely unsuccessful projects, until in 1962, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Although he was one of only six Americans to have acheived this honour, the decision was branded controversial by some of the American press.
In 1967 Steinbeck, whose elder son was involved in the war, went to Vietnam as a reporter for Newsday, but soon realised that he could not give his unquestioning support for the war, but he continued to back the soldiers for their thankless task. On his return to the United States in April 1967, Steinbeck was operated on for a back injury. After some months of ill health, he died of heart failure in December 1968. He is buried in Salinas, California.