Born in Salinas, California, in 1902, John Steinbeck 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 went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a labourer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel,
Cup of Gold (1929).After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two Californian fictions,
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 course regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the Californian labouring 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),
The Wayward Bus (1947),
The Pearl (1947),
A Russian Journal (1948), another experimental drama,
Burning Bright (1950), and
The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951) 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, with whom he travelled widely. Later books include
Sweet Thursday (1954),
The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957),
Once There was a War (1958),
The Winter
of Our Discontent(1961),
Travels with
Charley in Search of America (1962),
America and Americans (1966) and the posthumously published
Journal of a Novel: The'East of Eden' Letters (1969),
Viva Zapata! (1975),
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976) and
Working Days: The Journals of 'The Grapes of Wrath' (1989).He died in 1968, having won a Nobel Prize in 1962.
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