John Steinbeck (1902–1968) born in Salinas, California, 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
“A novel planned on the grandest possible scale . . . One of those
occasions when a writer has aimed high and then summoned every
ounce of energy, talent, seriousness, and passion of which he was
capable. . . . It is an entirely interesting and impressive book.”
—The New York Herald Tribune
“A fantasia and myth . . . A strange and original work of art.”
—The New York Times Book Review“A moving, crying pageant with
wilderness strengths.” —Carl Sandburg“When the book club ended
a year ago, I said I would bring it back when I found the book that
was moving . . . and this is a great one. I read it for myself for
the first time and then I had some friends read it. And we think it
might be the best novel we've ever read!” —Oprah Winfrey
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