STEINBECK, JOHN

John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr., (February 27, 1902–December 20, 1968) was an American writer and winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize for literature. His 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath is the single most important literary work dealing with the Great Depression.

Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California, and the area around Salinas became the setting of his best books. He graduated from Salinas High School in 1919 and attended Stanford University off and on without completing a degree. His first novel, Cup of Gold (1929), about the seventeenth-century pirate Henry Morgan, and his next two books, Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), received little attention. Carol Henning, who became his first wife in 1930, helped him focus his fiction on the suffering resulting from the Depression, and Ed Ricketts, a marine biologist he met shortly after his marriage, helped crystallize Steinbeck's vague notions about group behavior, individualism, and ecology. Ricketts's scientific outlook tempered Steinbeck's inveterate sentimentality. Tortilla Flat (1935), Steinbeck's first financially successful book, was the first to treat marginalized characters he had observed first hand. In Dubious Battle (1936) concerned a strike among migrant fruit pickers. Of Mice and Men (1937) is the tragic story of a pair of itinerant ranch hands. Steinbeck's greatest achievement, the crucial literary text of the Depression, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), is the story of an Oklahoma family who leaves the Dust Bowl and heads for California in search of the American dream. The Grapes of Wrath, a huge best-seller and Pulitzer Prize winner in 1940, assured Steinbeck's place in American literature.

Although Steinbeck published eighteen more books in his lifetime, nothing afterwards ever matched the critical success of The Grapes of Wrath. His writing after the 1930s lacks the power of his Depression novels. Perhaps what critics have regarded as Steinbeck's "decline" can be attributed to the prosperity after the war and his own financial success, which may have cost Steinbeck his affinity with those who are down and out. The divorce from his first wife in 1943 and the death of Ed Ricketts in 1948 contributed to his turning away from the concerns of the Depression-era novels. His moving to New York from California cut him off from the region so central to his best works. His return to that setting in Cannery Row (1945) and East of Eden (1952) resulted in books that were thematically incoherent and sentimental. Despite the critics' views about his later work, his books remained popular with the reading public. Travels with Charley (1962), an account of driving across the United States with his pet poodle to get a sense of the mood of the country in the 1960s, sold well but did not enhance his standing with literary critics. The Nobel Prize for literature that he was awarded in 1962 was clearly for his work more than two decades earlier. He died in New York in 1968. His ashes, taken across the country by his third wife and one of his sons from his second marriage, were interred in the Salinas cemetery.

STEINBECK, JOHN

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