Author won Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962
John Steinbeck, born in Salinas, California, in 1902, grew up in a
fertile agricultural valley, about twenty-five miles from the
Pacific Coast. Both the valley and the coast would serve as
settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford
University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and
writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree.
During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and
journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first
novel, Cup of Gold (1929). After marriage and a move to
Pacific Grove, he published two California books, The Pastures
of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked
on short stories later collected in The Long Valley (1938).
Popular success and financial security came only with Tortilla
Flat (1935), stories about Monterey's paisanos. A ceaseless
experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses
regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the
California laboring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of
Mice and Men (1937), and the book considered by many his
finest, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The Grapes of
Wrath won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize
in 1939. Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with
The Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious student of marine
biology with Sea of Cortez (1941). He devoted his services
to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial
play-novelette The Moon is Down (1942).Cannery Row
(1945), The Wayward Bus (1948), another experimental drama,
Burning Bright(1950), and The Log from the Sea of
Cortez (1951) preceded publication of the monumental East of
Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his
own family's history. The last decades of his life were spent in
New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he
traveled widely. Later books include Sweet Thursday (1954),
The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957), Once
There Was a War (1958), The Winter of Our Discontent
(1961), Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962),
America and Americans (1966), and the posthumously published
Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969), Viva
Zapata!(1975), The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble
Knights (1976), and Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes
of Wrath (1989). Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize in
Literature in 1962, and, in 1964, he was presented with the United
States Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Steinbeck
died in New York in 1968. Today, more than thirty years after his
death, he remains one of America's greatest writers and cultural
figures.
By the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
John Steinbeck knew and understood America and Americans better than any other writer of the twentieth century. (The Dallas Morning News) A man whose work was equal to the vast social themes that drove him. (Don DeLillo)
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