Steinbeck

The American novelist, storywriter, playwright named John Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. He is best remembered for THE GRAPES OF WRATH (1939), a novel widely considered to be a 20th-century classic. The impact of the book has been compared to that of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Steinbeck's epic about the migration of the Joad family, driven from its bit of land in Oklahoma to California, provoked a wide debate about the hard lot of migrant labourers, and helped to put an agricultural reform into effect.

"Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up in the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments." (from The Grapes of Wrath)

John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California. His native region of Monterey Bay was later the setting for most of his fiction. "We were poor people with a hell of a lot of land which made us think we were rich people," the author once recalled. Steinbeck's father was a county treasurer. From his mother, a teacher, Steinbeck learned to love books. Among his early favourites were Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Le Morte d'Arthur.

Steinbeck attended the local high school and worked on farms and ranches during his vacations. To finance his education, he held many jobs and sometimes dropped out of college for whole quarters. Between 1920 and 1926, he studied marine biology at Stanford University, but did not take a degree-he always planned to be a writer. Several of his early poems and short stories appeared in university publications. After spending a short time as a labourer on the construction of Madison Square Garden in New York City and reporter for the American, Steinbeck returned to California. While writing, Steinbeck took odd jobs. He was apprenticehood-carrier, apprentice painter, caretaker of an estate, surveyor, and fruit-picker. During a period, when he was as a watchman of a house in the High Sierra, Steinbeck wrote his first book, CUP OF GOLD (1929). It failed to earn back the $250 the publisher had given him in an advance.

In Pacific Grove in the early 1930s, Steinbeck met Edward Ricketts. He was a marine biologist, whose views on the interdependence of all life deeply influenced Steinbeck's thinking. THE SEA OF CORTEZ (1941) resulted from an expedition in the Gulf of California he made with Ricketts.

Steinbeck's first three novels went unnoticed, but his humorous tale of pleasure-loving Mexican-Americans, TORTILLA FLAT (1935), brought him wider recognition. The theme of the book-the story of King Arthur and the forming of the Round Table, which was well hidden from the readers and critics as well. However, Steinbeck's financial situation improved significantly-he had earned $35 a week for a long time, but now he was paid thousands of dollars for the film rights to Tortilla Flat.


For The Grapes of Wrath- the title originated from Julia Ward Howe's The Battle Hymn of the Republic (1861)-Steinbeck travelled around California migrant camps in 1936. When the book appeared, it was attacked by US Congressman Lyle Boren, who characterised it as "a lie, a black, infernal creation of twisted, distorted mind". Later, when Steinbeck received his Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy called it simply "an epic chronicle." The Exodus story of Okies on their way to an uncertain future in California ends with a scene in which Rose of Sharon, who has just delivered a stillborn child, suckles a starving man with her breast. "Rose of Sharon loosened one side of the blanket and bared her breast. 'You got to,' she said. She squirmed closer and pulled his head close. 'There!' she said. 'There.' Her hand moved behind his head and supported it. Her fingers moved gently in his hair. She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously."

John Ford's film version from 1940, produced by Darryl F. Zanuck, dismissed this ending-the final images optimistically celebrate President Roosevelt's New Deal. "We're the people that live. They can't wipe us out. They can't lick us. We'll go on forever, Pa, 'cause we're the people," says Ma Joad. Steinbeck himself was sceptical of Hollywood's faithfulness to his material. However, after seeing the film he said: "Zanuck has more than kept his word. He has a hard, straight picture in which the actors are submerged so completely that it looks and feels like a documentary film and certainly has a hard, truthful ring." Orson Welles did not like Ford's interpretation because he "made that into a story about mother love."

Fleeing publicity followed by the success of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck went to Mexico in 1940 to film the documentary Forgotten Village. During WW II, Steinbeck served as a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune in Great Britain and the Mediterranean area. He wrote such government propaganda as the novel THE MOON IS DOWN (1942), about resistance movement in a small town occupied by the Nazis. Its film version, starring Henry Travers, Cedric Hardwicke, and Lee J. Cobb, was shot on the set of How Green Was My Valley (1941), which depicted a Welsh mining village. "Free men cannot start a war," Steinbeck wrote, "but once it is started, they can fight on in defeat. Herd men, followers of a leader, cannot do that, and so it is always the herd men who win battles and the free men who win wars." Steinbeck had visited Europe in 1937 after gaining success with Of Mice and Men, and met on a Swedish ship two Norwegians, with whom he had celebrated Norway's Independence Day. In 1943 Steinbeck moved to New York City, his home for the rest of his life. His summers the author spent at Sag Harbor. He also travelled much in Europe.

Steinbeck's twelve-year marriage to Carol Henning had ended in 1942. Next year he married the singer Gwyndolyn Conger; they had two sons, Thom and John. However, the marriage was unhappy and they were divorced in 1949. Steinbeck's post-war works include THE PEARL (1947), a symbolic tale of a Mexican Indian pearl diver Kino. He finds a valuable pearl which changes his life, but not in the way he did expect. Kino sees the pearl as his opportunity to better life. When the townsfolk of La Paz learn of Kino's treasury, he is soon surrounded by a greedy priest, doctor, and businessmen. Kino's family suffers series of disasters and finally he throws the pearl back into ocean. Thereafter his tragedy is legendary in the town. Thematically Hemingway's novella The Old Man and the Sea from 1952 has much similarities with this work.

In 1950 Steinbeck married Elaine Scott, the ex-wife Randolph Scott, a Western star. Steinbeck's son John had problems in later years with drugs and alcohol; he died in 1991.

John Steinbeck died of heart attack in New York on December 20, 1968. In the posthumously published THE ACTS OF KING ARTHUR AND HIS NOBLE KNIGHTS (1976), Steinbeck turned his back on contemporary subjects and brought to life the Arthurian world with its ancient codes of honour. Steinbeck had started the work with enthusiasm but never finished it.

Various Sources Used