A Writer to the End

John Steinbeck was born today, February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California in a stately home on Central Ave (now open as a popular luncheon spot). He's been called "a giant of American letters," and many of his works are considered classics of Western literature. During his writing career, he authored 33 books, including 16 novels, six non-fiction books, and two collections of short stories. He’s widely known for Cannery Row (1945), the multi-generation epic East of Eden (1952), Of Mice and Men (1937). His Pulitzer Prize-winning The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is considered Steinbeck's masterpiece and part of the American literary canon. In the first 75 years after it was published, it sold 14 million copies. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.

Steinbeck was raised with modest means. His father, John Ernst Steinbeck, tried his hand at several different jobs to keep his family fed: He owned a feed-and-grain store, managed a flour plant and served as treasurer of Monterey County. His mother, Olive Hamilton Steinbeck, was a former schoolteacher.

For the most part, Steinbeck — who grew up with three sisters — had a happy childhood. He was shy but smart. He formed an early appreciation for the land and in particular California's Salinas Valley, which would greatly inform his later writing. Steinbeck decided to become a writer at the age of 14, often locking himself in his bedroom to write poems and stories.

During high school, Steinbeck would work late into the night in his attic room in Salinas and sometimes invited friends to his room to hear his stories:: “I used to sit in that little room upstairs,” Steinbeck writes decades later, “and write little stories and little pieces and send them out to magazines under a false name and I never put a return address on them…I wonder what I was thinking of? I was scared to death to get a rejection slip, but more, to get an acceptance.” Steinbeck wrote for his high school newspaper. By age 14, he knew he wanted to be a writer and never abandoned that calling.

In 1919, Steinbeck enrolled at Stanford University— a decision that had more to do with pleasing his parents than anything else — but all-the-while hoping to sharpen his writing skills. He took creative writing courses and enjoyed courses in world history. 

He attended Stanford off and on for six years, leaving in 1925 without receiving a degree.

He spent quite a bit of time supporting himself as a manual laborer while writing, and his experiences lent authenticity to his depictions of the lives of the workers in his stories. 

Steinbeck spent his summers working on nearby ranches and later with migrant workers on Spreckels sugar beet farms. There he learned of the harsher aspects of the migrant life and the darker side of human nature, which supplied him with material expressed in Of Mice and Men. He explored his surroundings, walking across local forests, fields, and farms. While working at Spreckels Sugar Company, he sometimes worked in their laboratory, which gave him time to write. He had considerable mechanical aptitude and fondness for repairing things he owned.

Steinbeck tried his hand as a freelance writer. He briefly moved to New York City, where he found work as a construction worker and a newspaper reporter, but then returned to California, where he took a job as a caretaker and tour guide in Lake Tahoe, where he met Carol Henning, his first wife. They married in January 1930 in Los Angeles, where, with friends, he attempted to make money by manufacturing plaster mannequins.

When their money ran out six months later due to a slow market, Steinbeck and Carol moved back to Pacific Grove, California, to a cottage owned by his father, on the Monterey Peninsula a few blocks outside the Monterey city limits. The elder Steinbecks gave John free housing, paper for his manuscripts, and from 1928, loans that allowed him to write without looking for work. 

During the Great Depression, Steinbeck bought a small boat, and later claimed that he was able to live on the fish and crab that he gathered from the sea, and fresh vegetables from his garden and local farms. When those sources failed, Steinbeck and his wife accepted welfare, and on rare occasions, stole bacon from the local produce market. Whatever food they had, they shared with their friends. Carol became the model for Mary Talbot in Steinbeck's novel Cannery Row. 

In 1930, Steinbeck met the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, who became a close friend and mentor to Steinbeck during the following decade, teaching him a great deal about philosophy and biology. Ricketts was a very quiet man, yet likable, with an inner self-sufficiency and an encyclopedic knowledge of diverse subjects. Ricketts became a key influence for Steinbeck. 

His works frequently explored the themes of fate and injustice, especially as applied to downtrodden or everyman protagonists. Most of Steinbeck's work is set in central California, particularly in the Salinas Valley and the California Coast Ranges region. The geography and demographics of the valley, the “Salad Bowl of the Nation,” stamped the young boy’s sensibilities. A strong sense of place is evident in his fiction: “I think I would like to write the story of this whole valley,” he wrote to a friend in 1933, when he was 31 years old, “of all the little towns and all the farms and the ranches in the wilder hills. I can see how I would like to do it so that it would be the valley of the world.” 

Widely considered Steinbeck's finest and most ambitious novel, 'The Grapes of Wrath' tells the story of a dispossessed Oklahoma family and their struggle to carve out a new life in California at the height of the Great Depression, the book captured the mood and angst of the nation during this time period. At the height of its popularity, The Grapes of Wrath sold 10,000 copies per week.

In the fall of 1936, he was asked by the San Francisco News to investigate conditions in migrant labor camps near Bakersfield, California. Living conditions in roadside camps appalled him, and his series of newspaper articles “The Harvest Gypsies,” exposes migrant woe. He also describes life in a federal government camp, where workers were given decent housing and running water.

Both his wrath and his optimism are woven into The Grapes of Wrath, a book that he researched for nearly two years after his first investigative trip to the Central Valley. As he was composing the novel, Steinbeck wrote to his literary agent, Elizabeth Otis, in 1938:

“I must go over into the interior valleys. There are about five thousand families starving to death over there…The states and counties will give them nothing because they are outsiders. But the crops of any part of this state could not be harvested without these outsiders. I’m pretty mad about it… Funny how mean and little books become in the face of such tragedies.” 

The New York Times listed The Grapes of Wrath as the best-selling book of 1939, and by February 1940, 430,000 copies had been printed. That same month, the novel won The National Book Award, and later that year it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. While wildly successful, The Grapes of Wrath also proved to be Steinbeck’s most controversial novel to date. His sympathy for the plight of migrant workers led to a backlash against him: in Oklahoma (the book made the state look poverty stricken), in California (the book made farmers and growers seem greedy and selfish) and in many other parts of the country (the gritty language of the Joads was shocking for many). 

Throughout most of the 1930s, Steinbeck had shunned publicity, and the firestorm over The Grapes of Wrath swamped him. He fell ill and his marriage to Carol began to fall apart—Steinbeck wished only to retreat from the publicity and requests for money and aid.

In 1940, Steinbeck earned a Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath.

After Pearl Harbor, Steinbeck became a supporter of the U.S. involvement in World War II. But because he was investigated by the FBI after the publication of Grapes—Steinbeck was denied a commission in the armed forces. Undeterred, he then devoted himself to writing propaganda for the war effort, publishing several works, to include The Moon is Down, about an occupied village in Northern Europe. He imagined what it would be like to live in a town where freedoms disappeared—and to many Europeans, he seemed to have captured the terror of Nazi occupation. In some countries during WWII, a person could be shot for having a contraband copy of The Moon is Down.

The Moon Is Down was made into a film almost immediately. It was presumed that the unnamed country of the novel was Norway and the occupiers the Nazis. In 1945, Steinbeck received the King Haakon VII Freedom Cross for his literary contributions to the Norwegian resistance movement.

In 1943, Steinbeck served as a World War II war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune and worked with the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the CIA). It was at that time he became friends with Will Lang, Jr. of Time/Life magazine. During the war, Steinbeck accompanied the commando raids of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.'s Beach Jumpers program, which launched small-unit diversion operations against German-held islands in the Mediterranean. At one point, he accompanied Fairbanks on an invasion of an island off the coast of Italy and used a Tommy Gun to help capture Italian and German prisoners. 

Steinbeck had this to say about his war dispatches: “There are many things in them I didn’t know I was writing—among others a hatred for war. Hell, I thought I was building the war up.”

In 1942, after his divorce from Carol he married Gwyndolyn "Gwyn" Conger.

Steinbeck had two sons with Gwyn— Thomas ("Thom") Myles Steinbeck (1944–2016) and John Steinbeck IV (1946–1991).

Ed Ricketts strongly influenced Steinbeck's writing. Steinbeck frequently took small trips with Ricketts along the California coast to give himself time off from his writing. Although Carol accompanied Steinbeck on some trips, their marriage was beginning to suffer, and ended a year later, in 1941, even as Steinbeck worked on the manuscript for Cannery Row.

Cannery Row is a complex book—in part gentle comedy about characters who live and work on Monterey’s Ocean View Avenue. In part it’s Steinbeck’s own post-war novel, suggesting his horror of death and loneliness witnessed when he was overseas. It’s also a tribute to his friend Ed Ricketts’s holistic vision, a vision that embraces all of life– the movement of a hermit crab to visionary insights. While working on the novel, Steinbeck wrote to his college roommate Carlton Sheffield, “You’ll find a lot of old things in it… Maybe we were sounder then. Certainly we were thinking more universally.” The novel became so famous that Ocean View Avenue in Monterey was renamed Cannery Row in 1958.

Ricketts was Steinbeck's model for the character of "Doc" in Cannery Row (1945) and Sweet Thursday (1954), "Friend Ed" in Burning Bright, and characters in In Dubious Battle (1936) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939).

While living with Gwyn in New York, Steinbeck received devastating news from California. Ed Ricketts had been hit by a train while attempting to cross the tracks in Monterey. Steinbeck hurried west, but he arrived too late. Ricketts died from injuries sustained from the accident on May 11, 1948.

Ricketts’s death devastated Steinbeck. The the two men had shared an intense working relationship as well as a deep personal friendship. “We worked and thought together very closely for a number of years so that I grew to depend on his knowledge and on his patience in research,” Steinbeck wrote, “And then I went away to another part of the country but it didn’t make any difference. Once a week or once a month would come a fine long letter so much in the style of his speech that I could hear his voice over the neat page full of small elite type… It wasn’t Ed who died but a large and important part of oneself.”

Immediately after returning to New York after Ricketts’s funeral, Steinbeck faced another blow. After nearly six years of marriage, Gwyn Steinbeck asked for a divorce. The divorce, combined with the shock of Ricketts’s death, sent Steinbeck into a long, deep depression. In 1948 he returned to the cabin in Pacific Grove and threw himself into his work.

Steinbeck's writing declined after Ricketts' untimely death.

Early in 1951, Steinbeck began again to compose the novel he had planned for years. Steinbeck intended East of Eden to be the “big work” of his career:

“I am choosing to write this book to my sons. They are little boys now and they will never know what they came from through me, unless I tell them…I want them to know how it was…the story of good and evil, of strength and weakness, of love and hate, of beauty and ugliness… I shall tell them this story against the background of the county I grew up in.”

Set largely in the Salinas Valley, East of Eden is, in part, based on Steinbeck’s maternal family history. In this epic novel of intertwined stories, Steinbeck captures his own history as well as the history of the Salinas Valley—and he also grapples with the pain and consequences of his divorce from Gwyn. Gwyn is Cathy/Kate in the novel, a manipulative woman who destroys many around her. The novel took nearly a year to complete, and was finally published in 1952. 

Steinbeck was a close associate of playwright Arthur Miller. In June 1957, Steinbeck took a personal and professional risk by supporting him when Miller refused to name names in the House Un-American Activities Committee trials. Steinbeck called the period one of the "strangest and most frightening times a government and people have ever faced."

Because J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI at the time, could find no basis for prosecuting Steinbeck, he used his power to encourage the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to audit Steinbeck's taxes every single year of his life, just to annoy him. In a 1942 letter to United States Attorney General Francis Biddle, John Steinbeck wrote: "Do you suppose you could ask Edgar's boys to stop stepping on my heels? They think I am an enemy alien. It is getting tiresome."

The FBI denied that Steinbeck was under investigation.

In June 1949, Steinbeck met stage-manager Elaine Scott at a restaurant in Carmel, California. Steinbeck and Scott eventually began a relationship and in December 1950, Steinbeck and Scott married. 

In 1962, Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for literature for his "realistic and imaginative writing, combining as it does sympathetic humor and keen social perception." The selection was heavily criticized, and described as "one of the Academy's biggest mistakes" in one Swedish newspaper.

Upon receiving the award, Steinbeck said the writer’s duty was “dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.”

The reaction of American literary critics was also harsh. The New York Times asked why the Nobel committee gave the award to an author whose "limited talent is, in his best books, watered down by tenth-rate philosophizing.”

Steinbeck, when asked on the day of the announcement if he deserved the Nobel, replied: "Frankly, no." Following his death six years later, The New York Times obituary asserted, "Steinbeck didn't need the Nobel Prize—the Nobel judges needed him."

In September 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded Steinbeck the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In 1967, at the behest of Newsday magazine, Steinbeck went to Vietnam to report on the war. He thought of the Vietnam War as a heroic venture and was considered a hawk for his position on the war. His sons served in Vietnam before his death, and Steinbeck visited one son in the battlefield. At one point he was allowed to man a machine-gun watch position at night at a firebase while his son and other members of his platoon slept.

His sympathetic portrayal of the United States Army led the New York Post to denounce him for betraying his liberal past. 

Perhaps due to his friendship with Johnson, or perhaps because one of his sons—eventually both sons–were serving overseas, Steinbeck wanted to go overseas to witness the realities of the Vietnam War. In 1967, he traveled to Vietnam to report on the war for Newsday. He visited combat zones, including remote area where his younger son.was posted. Steinbeck manned a machine-gun watch position while his son and other members of the platoon slept. During his weeks in Vietnam, Steinbeck grew disenchanted with the war and the inaccurate reports given to the American people. His wife Elaine said that Steinbeck changed his mind about the wisdom of the Vietnam war, but he did not live long enough to write more about it.

Throughout the mid-Sixties, Steinbeck’s health continued to decline. He suffered increasingly frequent episodes resembling mini-strokes, and eventually died at his home in New York City on December 20, 1968 of heart disease and congestive heart failure. He was 66, and had been a lifelong smoker. An autopsy showed nearly complete occlusion of the main coronary arteries.

In accordance with his wishes, his body was cremated, and interred on March 4, 1969 at the Hamilton family gravesite in Salinas, with those of his parents and maternal grandparents. His third wife, Elaine, was buried in the plot in 2004. 

The day after Steinbeck's death in New York City, reviewer Charles Poore wrote in The New York Times: "John Steinbeck's first great book was his last great book. But Good Lord, what a book that was and is: The Grapes of Wrath." Poore noted a "preachiness" in Steinbeck's work, "as if half his literary inheritance came from the best of Mark Twain—and the other half from the worst of Cotton Mather."

Steinbeck was, throughout his life, curious and engaged, and maintained the courage of his convictions—a writer to the end. 

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