John Ernst Steinbeck Jr is one of America’s greatest novelists. Steinbeck was born February 27th, 1902 and died of a heart attack on December 20th, 1968.(nobel page 1) He is the son of John Steinbeck and Olive Hamilton. Steinbeck wrote 27 books. Some of his best known work includes Of Mice and Men (1937), The Long Valley (1938), and East of Eden (1962). Since Steinbeck was raised and grew up in the early 1900’s, his novels were greatly influenced by the hard rural labor that many people worked in. Many of Steinbeck’s could be classified as social novels because he often wrote about the economic problems of the rural labor.
Being born in Salinas, California, many of Steinbeck's novels were based in that area. He had a happy childhood and grew up with three sisters. Steinbeck was intelligent and shy and from a young age he learned to appreciate hard working people and the land. He looked up to his father who worked hard to support the family. “His father, John Ernst Steinbeck, tried his hand at several different jobs to keep his family fed: He owned a feed-and-grain store, managed a flour plant and was the treasurer of Monterrey County. His mother, Olive Hamilton Steinbeck, was a former schoolteacher.” (bio page1)
At 14 years old Steinbeck realized that he loved writing and would frequently lock himself in his room and write all day. Since Steinbeck was very smart and did well at school, The University of Stanford, a very prestigious school, would accept him and he enrolled there in 1919. Steinbeck only went to Stanford to please his parents and didn’t want to disappoint them. Eventually, he would declare that his only true interest is to write and there would be no reason to be in school so he dropped out of The University o...
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...beck received the Nobel Prize for literature. The president of the United States at that time (Lyndon Johnson) allocated Steinbeck with the Medal in Freedom and to top everything off he was on a U.S. postage stamp. John Steinbeck will always be remembered in American literature history.
Works Cited
"Biography." IMDb. IMDb.com, n.d. Web. 27 Feb. 2014
JACK, PETER MONRO. "John Steinbeck's New Novel Brims With Anger and Pity."Nytimes.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Feb. 2014.
"John Steinbeck Biography." Bio.com. A&E Networks Television, n.d. Web. 26 Feb. 2014.
"John Steinbeck Biography." John Steinbeck. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Feb. 2014.
"John Steinbeck - Biographical". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2013. Web. 26 Feb 2014.
"The Big Read." The Grapes of Wrath. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Feb. 2014.
Levant, Howard. The Novels of John Steinbeck: A Critical Study. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1974.
John Steinbeck was born in 1902, in California's Salinas Valley, a region that would eventually serve as the setting for Of Mice and Men, as well as many of his other works. He studied literature and writing at Stanford University. He then moved to New York City and worked as a laborer and journalist for five years, until he completed his first novel in 1929, Cup of Gold. With the publication of Tortilla Flat in 1935, Steinbeck achieved fame and became a popular author. He wrote many novels about the California laboring class. Two of his more famous novels included Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck got the title for Of Mice and Men from a line of Robert Burns, a Scottish poet, “The best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry." In Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck includes the theme of loyalty and sacrifice between friends. Steinbeck illustrates the loyalty and sacrifice between friends through the friendship of Lennie and George.
Levant, Howard. The Novels of John Steinbeck: a Critical Study. Columbia: U of Missouri Press, 1974.
... read and his beautiful and descriptive style allow me to say with absolute certainty that Steinbeck has developed into being my favorite author over the past few months. Yet, as I bring this paper to a close, I know that I have barely skimmed the surface of who this man was and why he wrote what he did the way he did.
9. John Steinbeck was a wither since he was in high school, he wrote stories for magazines using a false name. At school he wrote for the newspaper. John Steinbeck, as a child, was hired to work at ranches in the Salinas Valley. He writes about his home in the Valley and about the migrant workers which was in his
I. John Steinbeck used his personal experiences as a laborer to write many of his novels like Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath.
Rascoe, Burton. "John Steinbeck," in Steinbeck and His Critics: A Record of Twenty-Five Years, edited by E. W. Tedlock, Jr. and C. V. Wicker, University of New Mexico Press, 1957, pp. 57-67, in Contemporary Literary Criticism Vol. 75, edited by Thomas Votteler, Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1993, pp. 336-339.
John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California in the the year 1902. He grew up in a farmland environment which helped him in his writings of this novel. Steinbeck actually went to school at Stanford but never graduated. He wrote an astonishing 25 books, of which sixteen were novels, six non-fiction books, and several short stories. If that was not impressive enough, in 1962, he received the nobel prize for literature. Through many of his books, he flooded his stories with characters who always seemed to struggle, many times about the working class and the immigrant workers during times like the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. Over time, he noticed that he had a more profound, moving voice when using examples from his own memories in his writings as opposed to just making the stories up.
her. After this experience, Steinbeck wrote to a friend, "The house in Salinas is pretty
While growing up in Salinas, Steinbeck had the opportunity to spend a lot of time outdoors. His uncle used to take him on fishing trips, and combined with the times he visited his maternal grand-fathers' farm near King City, it undoubtedly gave him an appreciation for nature. Later in his life, he became a caretaker on a "large estate at Lake Tahoe," and he continued to spend time in nature throughout his life and often took his sons to go fishing or camping when they visited him during the summers (Steinbeck, E. & Wallsten, P.., 1975).
His Childhood in His Native Terrain: Early in his life, Steinbeck formed fascination for the land and wrote in appreciation of the California's Salinas Valley:
John Steinbeck continued to write for the rest of his life, but many consider his writing career to have ended before he received the Nobel Prize.
John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California on February 27th, 1902. His mother, Olive Steinbeck, was a teacher and also was a major influence on John's writing. His father, John Steinbeck Sr., was a county treasurer. When Steinbeck was a child, during his summers off from school, he worked on a farm, which was a good experience for later writing. In the beginning of 1919, Steinbeck was accepted to the University of Stanford. Later, in 1925, he left without a degree. He wrote lots of short stories and articles for the College's newspaper. Steinbeck moved to New York to write, but had to support himself by being a construction worker. He started writing for the New York American, but didn't make enough, so had to keep his construction job. In 1929, Steinbeck returned to Salinas to write Cup of Gold. He had to work as a caretaker for a summer home in Lake Tahoe. In 1930, he meets Edward Ricketts, who gets him interested in marine biology. Steinbeck also married his first wife, Carol Henning. He publishes more novels such as the Pastures of Heaven, and To a God Unknown; but of all those, Tortilla Flat was his first selling novel. This was published in 1935. In 1936, he also published In Dubious Battle and in 1937, Of Mice and Men. Then, possibly one of Steinbeck's best selling/ greatest works, the Grapes of Wrath, was published. This publication won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book award in 1939. He told stories of families that were poor during the depression and of their powerless efforts against the government and society that has put them down. Steinbeck then traveled to Mexico to shoot the film Forgotten Village (documentary). When he returned to the United States, he became a war correspondent and wrote about the Second World War. He moved back to New York City and married Gywn Conger, in 1943. Then they had two sons, Tom, in 1944 and another son in 1946, named John IV. By 1948, Steinbeck divorced his wife, went to Russia three times, and lost his good friend, Edward Ricketts in a car crash. Then he quickly married Elaine Anderson Scott in 1950. By 1959, Steinbeck published several screenplays and served as a correspondent for the Vietnam War. In 1960, he toured the US with his poodle and recorded his travels and titling it Travels With Charlie.
John Steinbeck was perhaps the best author of all time. He was the winner of a Nobel Prize, and among other accomplishments, Steinbeck published nineteen novels and made many movies during his lifetime. All of his experience and knowledge are shown through his novels. A reader can tell, just in reading a novel by Steinbeck, that he had been through a lot throughout his life. Also, Steinbeck worked very hard to accomplish everything that he did during his lifetime. Nothing came very easily to him, and he had to earn everything he owned. This helped him in his writing, because he was able to write about real people and real experiences. John Steinbeck got his inspiration from life experiences, people he knew, and places he had gone.
John Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902 in Salinas, California. Between 1919 and 1925 Steinbeck was acknowledged as a special student at Stanford University. According to Peter Lisac, “Variously employed as a had-carrier, fruit-picker, apprentice printer, laboratory assistant, caretaker, surveyor, reporter, writer, and foreign correspondent let him acquire knowledge in many areas.” (1) Even in his youth, Steinbeck developed a love of the natural world and diverse cultures. Steinbeck produced two children from his second wife, Elaine Scott. The early 1930’s became a struggle for Steinbeck, both in his