John Steinbeck has long been one of America's best-loved writers. With his intuitive feeling for folklore and magnificent use of the vernacular, he created works that stimulate the imagination, stir the reader's thoughts and emotions, and leave them with an awareness of life. Steinbeck's use of simple themes and his concern for common human values, combined with thoughtfulness, philosophical presence, and humor, make his works timeless.
John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California, on 27 February 1902. He grew up in a fertile agricultural valley about twenty five miles from the Pacific Coast-and both valley and coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he attended Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without finishing a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City and then as a caretaker for a Lake Tahoe estate, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929). After his first marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two fictitious works centered in California, 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). 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) and The Pearl (1947) 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 Elaine, with whom he traveled widely. Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. He died on December 20, 1968 at the age of 66.
