John SteinbeckJohn Steinbeck was born in February 27, 1902 in Salinas, California. Salinas wasan agricultural valley in California. His father was the county treasurer andhis mother was a schoolteacher. This is where his education began from a motherthat encouraged him to read.
The community was a comfortable environment for himto live in because of the encouragement of independence and initiative. Hisparents didn’t want him to be a writer. They wanted him to have a trueprofession as a lawyer. His early interest in reading led him through school,with his main interest in science.
At age 15 he decided to become a writer,influenced by an English teacher, and faintly remembered by schoolmates forspending so much time in his room writing. After graduating from high school, hewent to Stanford University in 1920. While he was there for five he contributedto the school paper by writing poems and comics. He took courses in science andwriting, but never received a degree. In 1925, when he left Stanford, he becamea marine biologist.
He moved to New York in 1925 to work as a reporter for anewspaper. Always being a non-conformist, he was fired from the newspaper forwriting opinions instead of facts. This started the many jobs he would be a partof in his lifetime. Some of these jobs include an apprentice hod carrier, anapprentice printer, a working chemist, caretaker of Lake Tahoe Estate, surveyorin Big Sur County, and a fruit picker.
He also worked other more physicallylabored jobs, such as a rancher, road worker, deck hand, cotton picker, andbricklayer. While involved in these jobs, he made many close friends that hecame to admire because of their “cant and hypocrisy” which he applauded andwhom all of these people soon were characters in his novels. Many of theseexperiences were the “helpers” to his many novels. His fruit picking andGreat Depression led him to write The Grapes of Wrath, his best known and mostambitious of his works. Also, he wrote Of Mice and Men, which was formed fromhis job as a hired hand on the many farms he worked. Many things affected hiswriting of the time period of which he wrote.
Things like the Great Depression,World War 2, and the Vietnam War are the major influences. World War 2 was whenhe was working for the federal government as a writer, so his works focused ongreed and materialism in the beings of modern civilization, Cannery Row and TheWayward Bus are two good examples of this idea. After World War 2, he wrotemainly of several outcasts. The Grapes of Wrath was an influential piece fromthe Great Depression and the Dust Bowl that existed in California. It is aboutthe migration of farm families, leaving their old towns to become “ghosttowns.
” A bit of inventions came into effect during this time period. Technology was changing the way that Americans lived and worked. The playerpiano was invented in 1905. Henry Ford Model T in 1908. Everyone has heard ofthe Titanic right? Well, it sunk in 1912.
One of the most important things thathas ever happened in history occurred in 1921. Yes, your right, it was the dateof the first Miss America Pageant. The Great Depression began in 1928. The greatGolden Gate Bridge was also completed in 1937. John Steinbeck and F. ScottFitzgerald seemed to divide America up into a new age or era.
Fitzgerald seemedto work more with the rich, finding pity and terror in them. Steinbeck took tothe growing of California, the Depression, and poverty. John Steinbeck won thePulitzer Prize award for his book The Grapes of Wrath in 1940. He also won theNobel Peace Prize award in 1962. He was the sixth American to win the NobelPrize for literature.
His novel, Tortilla Flat, received the CaliforniaCommonwealth Club’s annual gold medal for the best novel by a Californiawriter. It was adopted for the stage and sold to Hollywood. He focused somewhaton nature, with some “humor,” but seemed to have sympathy for “theoppressed, misfits, and the distressed. ” He wrote about conflicts between hisfeelings for nature and his sympathy for human beings. To be natural and notrespectable, was in his fiction, the controlling force of the universe. He wasbest known for his basis on the American experience often with sympathetic focuson the poor, eccentric, or the dispossessed.
The Grapes of Wrath, which he wrotein 1939, was his best known and most famous work. It won the Pulitzer Prize in1940. This book consisted of a family that migrated from the Dust Bowl toCalifornia to finally experience death, disease, and starvation. This book, likemany of his works, turned out to also be a famous movie. He was married 3 times.
He fathered two boys to his second wife. Their names were John and Tom. JohnSteinbeck died on December 20, 1968 in New York City. We searched if he died ifsome kind of illness, but we found nothing.
So he must have died of naturalcauses.
