John Steinbeck, California's Preeminent Writer
Unlike many writers of the 1930s, John Steinbeck remained rooted to the land of his birth.
Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of
human need for it and it has not changed
California?s preeminent regional writer, John Steinbeck, was born on February 27, 1902 at Salinas of solid, middle-class stock. His youth in Salinas and the surrounding Long Valley would have a profound impact on his life and career. He attended Stanford University off and on for six years, before dropping out in 1925 to support himself through odd jobs. A big, rough-hewed man, Steinbeck worked in the fields, packing sheds, and processing plants of the region. These places provided the settings and characters of some of his finest novels.
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 highly acclaimed trilogy of labor novels.
In Dubious Battle (1936) narrates the struggle of striking fruit pickers, whose individual dignity is assailed by the growers and manipulated by the Community 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) traces the migration of an Oklahoma dust bowl family to California and their hardships as migrant farm workers. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
To gather material on the dust bowl refugees, Steinbeck in 1936 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 deaden stares of starving children ? changed his life forever.
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 film-maker, 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.
During World War II he served as a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. His dispatches, filed from England, North Africa and Italy in 1943, evoke the human side of war and the emotional impact on those who participated in it.
The war had transformed America, and Steinbeck, alienated by the whole tenor of modern life, sought a spiritual refuge of sorts in the myths and history of Mexico. In stories like The Pearl (1947) and film scripts like Viva Zapata (1952) he extols the communal village culture of the Mexican people and the idealism of 1910 revolutionary figures like Emiliano Zapata.
The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor, Maine with his third wife, Elaine Scott, 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 honoring his 1930s novels. 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 City at the age of sixty-six. His ashes were interred in the family plot in the Garden of Memories cemetery in Salinas.
John Steinbeck imbued his work with a sense of place and environment. His novels and short stories are set in real places: the Gabilan and Santa Lucia mountains, Salinas Valley, Monterey, Carmel Valley, San Antonio Valley and Big Sur. His characters are composites of real people. His writing about California reflects a deep connection to the rhythms of nature and to the oral traditions of people?the farm laborers, ranchers, migrants, and hobos?who lived and worked in that world.
The author of some twenty-five books, Steinbeck has 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 always, the struggle for human connection and dignity?still gnaw at the underbelly of American life.
