John Steinbeck, America's Preminent Regional Writer
Impact of place on Steinbeck's Writing
Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of
human need for it and it has not changed
except to become more needed.
From John Steinbeck?s Nobel Prize Acceptance speech, 1962
John Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902 in a restored Queen Anne Victorian, now the Steinbeck House restaurant, at 132 Central Avenue, Salinas. Born into a family of solid, middle-class stock, young Steinbeck grew up feeling awkward and outside the rural community with its emphasis on church going, athletic and hunting prowess, and adolescent popularity. Shy, somewhat standoffish, he visited Chinatown and the brothels around Soledad Street, and rambled through the backcountry, talking to the Mexican and Filipino farm workers. He developed a rich inner life that revolved around his love of nature and language.
Steinbeck attended Stanford University off and on for six years, supporting himself through odd jobs, before dropping out in 1925. A big, rough-hewed man, he worked as a bench chemist and in the fields and processing plants at the Spreckels Sugar plant in Salinas. These places and the associations he developed with Mexican and Filipino work crews, itinerant laborers and hobos would provide the settings and characters of some of his finest novels.
In 1930 he married Carol Henning, an attractive, outspoken woman, whom he had met two years earlier. The couple lived in a rustic, batt-and-board, three-room cottage at Pacific Grove near the sea.
Owned by his parents, the cottage was John and Carol?s safety net during the Great Depression. They lived here rent-free. John fished the bay from a small, battered sailboat, and gathered driftwood along the beach. With Carol working intermittently, the young couple was better off than most. For the first time, John could write full-time, while Carol typed and edited his manuscripts. The sea, its craggy shoreline and tide pools teeming with life, inspired his development as both a writer and a scientist.
While here Steinbeck finished The Red Pony , wrote In Dubious Battle , and began work on Of Mice and Men here. In the evenings, the little cottage frequently became a gathering place for a growing circle of friends, who stopped by for fish cookouts, wine and conversation, including the self-trained marine biologist Ed Ricketts, Steinbeck?s closest friend and confidant. A remarkably complex and engaging man, Ricketts owned the Pacific Biological Laboratory on the Monterey waterfront surrounded by sardine canneries.
While the Depression starved many an embryonic writer, it made Steinbeck, gave him theme, sinew, and song. Unlike many writers, he remained close to home, anchored to the sea and land of his birth: to its sounds and smells and the voices of its people. In a single decade, despite financial and literary obstacles, Steinbeck would write eight books in all, including his first major success, Tortilla Flat (1935), a funny, satirical collection of tales about a group of down-and-out Mexican Americans, and his highly acclaimed trilogy of novels about California?s rural underclass.
In Dubious Battle (1936) narrates the struggle of striking fruit pickers, whose individual dignity is assailed by the growers and manipulated by the Communist Party. Of Mice and Men (1937) weaves a tale of hope turned to tragedy as it recounts the remarkable friendship between two itinerant workers, the simpleminded Lennie and his protector George. Set against a backdrop of searing poverty and environmental disaster, The Grapes of Wrath (1939) follows an Oklahoma dust bowl family to California, where they face poverty, hunger, and hatred as migrant farm workers. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the following year.
To gather material on the dust bowl refugees, Steinbeck in 1936 had traveled with Tom Collins, the director of the government-run migrant camps, on highway 99 into the San Joaquin Valley. The two men traveled in an old bakery wagon. What Steinbeck saw ? the mud-splattered roadside camps, the sickness and hunger, and always the glazed, sleep-like stare of starving children ? haunted him forever.
He returned on several occasions to further document and expose the inequities of a farm-labor system that he believed would rip the social fabric of society apart unless the public could pressure the national government to intervene. In February 1938, Steinbeck returned a final time to help government relief workers rescue 4,000 families, stranded at Visalia by floods and on the verge of mass starvation.
To Steinbeck, the Joads and thousands of other Okies were a proud, traditional people caught in the vise of an ever changing, incomprehensible modern world. They represented an older America of yeoman family farmers, turned off the lands of their forefathers and forced to wander into the twentieth century as "migrant men." The Grapes of Wrath was a testimony to their collective spirit ? to their refusal to let go of their faltering hold on human dignity.
The novel became an immediate bestseller. Daryl Zanuck, the Hollywood filmmaker, bought the motion picture rights to it for $75,000 and turned it into a classic docudrama by the same name, starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, John Carradine as Preacher Casey and Jane Darwell as Ma Joad. Steinbeck, in turn, became a household name ? America?s preeminent artist and social critic.
An intensely private man, Steinbeck hated being in the national spotlight. Believing that the writer, as artist, must always remain in the shadow of his work, he was leery of fame and fortune.
Furthermore, the uproar over The Grapes of Wrath ? the demands on his time by the publicity gristmill and attacks by the political right for his grim depiction of migrant farm-labor conditions and by churches for his use of profanity and lewd scenes ? drained and depressed him.
Anxious to escape, he teamed up with his old sidekick, Ed Ricketts, in 1940, put together a crew, and sailed a fishing trawler down the Baja coastline to the Sea of Cortez. Out of this adventure came a wonderful collaborative travelogue, The Sea of Cortez (1941), in which the two men muse about philosophy, science, marine life, and the people and places they visited. This was the first book-length, non-fiction work written by Steinbeck, and it reflected his deep interest in the value of an ecological worldview as the basis of all life.
The writer always had a special affinity for Mexico and its people, and the voyage rekindled that interest. Almost as soon as he got back to Monterey, he returned to Mexico City ? this time to write the script of The Forgotten Village (1941), a documentary about a small boy who defies traditional taboos to bring modern medicine to his disease-ravaged village.
After World War II, Steinbeck would return intermittently to Mexico, seeking a spiritual refuge of sorts in the myths and history of the country. In allegorical stories like The Pearl (1947) and film scripts like Viva Zapata (1952), Steinbeck extols the communal village culture of the Mexican people and the sacrifice of 1910 revolutionary leaders like Emiliano Zapata.
As he matured, Steinbeck experimented with different genre of writing, including novellas, film scripts, and non-fiction. His short stories set in the foothills of the Gabilan Mountains, including "The Red Pony," the classic about a young boy?s heartbreaking love of a colt that succumbs to illness, appeared in The Long Valley (1945) collection. In 1949, Steinbeck wrote the filmscript to the motion picture version, which featured an evocative musical score by the composer Aaron Copland.
The last decades of Steinbeck?s life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor, Long Island with his third wife, Elaine Scott, whom he loved deeply and with whom he traveled widely. His later works, including the popular East of Eden (1952), an ambitious novel about family fratricide, and Travels with Charley (1962), a cross-country auto tour with his poodle, never received the critical acclaim that his 1930s novels did. The loss of connection to place and community had steadily etched its way into his later writings. "The place of my origin had changed, and having gone away I had not changed with it," he wrote in Travels with Charley about his return to Monterey.
In 1962, Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for literature "for his realistic as well as imaginative writings, distinguished by a sympathetic humor and keen social perception."
Six years later, he died of heart failure in New York at the age of sixty-six. His ashes were interred in the family plot in the Garden of Memories cemetery in Salinas.
John Steinbeck is America?s preeminent naturalist writer. He took as his central theme the quiet dignity of the poor and the oppressed. Although his characters are often trapped in an unfair world, they remain heroic, if defeated, human beings.
A nineteenth-century man, he was guided by simple principles and a belief that difficulty often brought out the best in people. The poverty that he saw during the 1930s both angered and appalled him. For Steinbeck, the ultimate blame rested not so much with capitalism, but with the whole tenor of modern life: its complexity and interdependence, its pursuit of money and efficiency, and its creation of impersonal forces that seemed to dwarf the human spirit.
His politics or lack of them reaped scorn from the conservative popular press and disdain from the eastern literary establishment. Nonetheless, of the three giants of the American novel of that generation ? William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck ? it is Steinbeck who speaks to the world community most urgently and appealingly today. He is the most widely read American author outside of the United States. "His works reflect a deep understanding of human beings as they are, people?s souls, people as part of the landscape; people as part of the world," says Natalia Portas, a young high school teacher from Spain.
As an artist and a scientist deeply engaged with the problems of his time, Steinbeck left a lasting legacy in literature, history, marine biology, and other disciplines. The very questions he raised in the ?30s and ?40s ? homelessness, migration, poverty, moral responsibility, public hypocrisy, and the struggle for human connection and dignity ? still gnaw at the underbelly of American life.
