The Grapes of Wrath - National Steinbeck Center

Vietnam War Home Movies Saigon PBR John Steinbeck Long Tau Minesweeper
"LTJG BOB MARTIN REPORTING" -- home movies filmed by LtJG Robert Martin during Dec 1966 and Jan 1967 with audio from news reports and interviews he taped in Saigon, Can Tho, and elsewhere in the Third Coastal Zone. This short clip includes parts of interviews with John Steinbeck and Billy Graham.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwC3EgQoiNQ

Images:
1. John Steinbeck holding an M-72 grenade launcher while talking with infantrymen in Vietnam
2. John Steinbeck in a UH-1 reflecting on what he has observed in South Vietnam
3. John Steinbeck in South Vietnam, in 1965 LBJ asked him to visit South Vietnam and report back to him personally.
4. John Steinbeck in South Vietnam, in 1965 LBJ asked him to visit South Vietnam and report back to him personally.


Biographies:
1. imdb.com/name/nm0825705/bio
2. bs.eferrit.com/biografija-pisca-john-steinbeck/]

1. Background from {[https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0825705/bio]}
John Steinbeck Biography
Overview
Born February 27, 1902 in Salinas, California, USA
Died December 20, 1968 in New York City, New York, USA (heart disease)
Birth Name John Ernst Steinbeck
Height 6' (1.83 m)

Mini Bio
John Steinbeck was the third of four children and the only son born to John Ernst and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck. His father was County Treasurer and his mother, a former schoolteacher. John graduated from Salinas High School in 1919 and attended classes at Stanford University, leaving in 1925 without a degree. He was variously employed as a sales clerk, farm laborer, ranch hand and factory worker. In 1925, he traveled by freight from Los Angeles to New York, where he was a construction worker. From 1926-1928, he was a caretaker in Lake Tahoe, CA. His first novel, "Cup of Gold," was published in 1929. During the 1930s, he produced most of his famous novels ("To a God Unknown," "Tortilla Flat," "In Dubious Battle," "Of Mice and Men," and his Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Grapes of Wrath"). In 1941, he moved with the singer who would become his second wife to New York City. They had two sons, Thom (b. 1944) and John IV (b. 1946). In 1948, his close friend Ed Ricketts died, he went through a divorce, he took a a tour of Russia, and he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His wrote the screenplay for Viva Zapata! (1952), and 17 of his works have been made into movies. He received three Academy Award nominations. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. US President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded him the United States Medal of Freedom in 1964, and he was commemorated on a U.S. postage stamp on what would have been his 75th birthday. His ashes lie in Garden of Memories Cemetery in Salinas.
- IMDb Mini Biography By: Ed Stephan < [login to see] .edu>

Spouse (3)
Elaine Anderson (28 December 1950 - 20 December 1968) ( his death)
Gwyndolyn Conger (29 March 1943 - 1948) ( divorced) ( 2 children)
Carol Henning (14 January 1930 - 18 March 1943) ( divorced)


Trivia (10)
1. Born at 3:00pm-PST.
2. His novella "Sweet Thursday," a sequel to his classic "Cannery Row," is based on the original book he wrote for the 1955 Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein musical, "Pipe Dream." Although it won five 1956 Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and ran for 246 performances, "Pipe Dreams" is considered one of their least successful shows, just as the book itself is considered one of Steinbeck's weaker works. "Sweet Thursday" also serves as the basis for David S. Ward's film Cannery Row (1982), as the story, plot, and characters rely more on the former rather than the latter.
3. According to his biographer Jay Parini and the New York Times, Steinbeck in the mid-1990s was the most popular deceased American writer, with 750,00 copies of his works selling annually. His popularity has not diminished over the years but has rather increased, particularly after Oprah Winfrey made his "East of Eden" the first selection of her revived book club in 2003. The book immediately became the #2 bestseller on amazon.com, and Steinbeck's publisher, Penguin Group USA, printed 600,000 new copies. Normally, the book sells fewer than 50,000 copies annually. It is a remarkable phenomenon considering that the book originally was a #1 best seller when it was published in 1952!.
4. Steinbeck, one of the seminal American authors of the 20th century, was humiliated when the N.Y. Times excoriated the Swedish Academy for naming him the winner of the Nobel Prize Literature for 1962, saying there were more deserving writers to honor. Humble and blunt, when asked whether he deserved it at his press conference after receiving the news of the prize, he answered, "No." The criticism that he was undeserving of literature's greatest prize was soon picked up by the American literati, further compounding the wound. While Steinbeck had been enormously popular in his home country, penning four #1 best sellers, his critical reputation had sagged since the mid-1940s. However, he had remained a highly respected author outside the U.S., particularly among those who enjoyed his harsh critique of American materialism, although he was bewildered by foreign fans who still believed that the U.S. was the Depression-era America he had described in the 1930s. He was particularly beloved by Scandinavians for his WWII novella "The Moon is Down," a 1942 propaganda piece about the Norwegian resistance. In fact, so high was his esteem, he was singled out for extra-special treatment during the Stockholm ceremonies. Though that pleased him, he remained bitter about the criticism his fellow Americans had put him through until the end of his life.
5. Two sons with 2nd wife: Thom and John IV. Only Thom survives as of this writing (June 2005). He has recently published a book of short-stories, and is said to be working on a novel.
6. Steinbeck, a noted liberal whom the government suspected was a member of the Communist Party, was outraged by what he regarded as director Alfred Hitchcock's racism as manifested in his condescension towards the George 'Joe' Spencer character played by Canada Lee in Lifeboat (1944).
7. Was denied a military commission during World War II due to his left-wing politics. His future collaborator, Elia Kazan, similarly was turned down during the war due to his own political beliefs. Both served the war effort in a civilian capacity, Steinbeck as a journalist and propagandist.
8. One of the few Nobel laureates for literature to be nominated for an Academy Award for writing. Steinbeck was nominated three times for Lifeboat (1944), A Medal for Benny (1945) (with Jack Wagner) and Viva Zapata! (1952). Other Oscar-nominated Nobel laureates include George Bernard Shaw, who won an Oscar for Pygmalion (1938), as well as Jean-Paul Sartre and Harold Pinter.
9. The stage version for "Of Mice and Men" was awarded the 1977 Joseph Jefferson Citation for Play Production at the Wisdom Bridge Theatre in Chicago, Illinois.
10. Through his ancestors John Rolfe and Mary Sculliard is a seventh cousin twice removed of Barack Obama.

Personal Quotes (13)
1. A man on a horse is spiritually, as well as physically, bigger than a man on foot.
2. Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, and then steps in it.
3. It has always been my private conviction that any man who puts his intelligence up against a fish and loses had it coming.
4. I have never smuggled anything in my life. Why then do I feel an uneasy sense of guilt on approaching a customs barrier?
5. The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid stable business.
6. [advice to his young son] There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you - of kindness and consideration and respect - not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak, but the second can release in you strength and courage and goodness, and even wisdom you didn't know you had.
7. It is a common experience that a problem, difficult at night, is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.
8. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.
9. Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.
10. We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.
11. I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quick vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.
12. In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.
13. If you're in trouble or hurt or need-go to poor people. They're the only ones that'll help-the only ones.

Salary (1)
The Grapes of Wrath (1940) $75,000 (film rights)"


2. Background from {[https://bs.eferrit.com/biografija-pisca-john-steinbeck/]}
by Patricia Daniels, Contributing Writer
Updated February 27, 2018
John Steinbeck was an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist who is best known for his Depression-era novel, "The Grapes of Wrath," which earned him a Pulitzer Prize.
Several of Steinbeck's novels have become modern classics and many were made into successful films and plays. John Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962 and the Presidential Medal of Honor in 1964.

Dates: Feb. 27, 1902 – Dec. 20, 1968
Also Known As: John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr.
Famous Quote: "Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps on it."
Steinbeck's Childhood
John Steinbeck was born Feb. 27, 1902, in Salinas, California to Olive Hamilton Steinbeck, a former teacher, and John Ernst Steinbeck, the manager of a local flour mill. Young Steinbeck had three sisters. As the only boy in the family, he was somewhat spoiled and pampered by his mother.
John Ernst Sr. instilled in his children a deep respect for nature and taught them about farming and how to care for animals. The family raised chickens and hogs and owned a cow and a Shetland pony. (The beloved pony, named Jill, would become the inspiration for one of Steinbeck's later stories, "The Red Pony.")
Reading was highly valued in the Steinbeck household. Their parents read classics to the children and young John Steinbeck learned to read even before he started school. He soon developed a knack for making up his own stories.

High School and College Years
Shy and awkward as a young child, Steinbeck became more confident during high school. He worked on the school newspaper and joined the basketball and swim teams. Steinbeck blossomed under the encouragement of his ninth-grade English teacher, who praised his compositions and persuaded him to keep writing.
After graduating from high school in 1919, Steinbeck attended Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Bored by many of the subjects required to earn a degree, Steinbeck only signed up for classes that appealed to him, such as literature, history, and creative writing. Steinbeck dropped out of college periodically (in part because he needed to earn money for tuition), only to resume classes later on.
In between stints at Stanford, Steinbeck worked on various California ranches during harvest time, living among itinerant farmhands. From this experience, he learned about the life of the California migrant worker. Steinbeck loved hearing stories from his fellow workers and offered to pay anyone who told him a story he could later use in one of his books.
By 1925, Steinbeck decided he'd had enough of college. He left without ever finishing his degree, ready to move on to the next phase of his life. While many aspiring writers of his era traveled to Paris for inspiration, Steinbeck set his sights on New York City.

Steinbeck in New York City
After working all summer to earn money for his trip, Steinbeck set sail for New York City in November 1925. He traveled on a freighter down the coasts of California and Mexico, through the Panama Canal and up through the Caribbean before reaching New York.
Once in New York, Steinbeck supported himself by working a variety of jobs, including as a construction worker and a newspaper reporter. He wrote steadily during his off hours and was encouraged by an editor to submit his group of stories for publication.
Unfortunately, when Steinbeck went to submit his stories, he learned that the editor no longer worked at that publishing house; the new editor refused to even look at his stories.
Angry and disheartened by this turn of events, Steinbeck abandoned his dream of making it as a writer in New York City. He earned passage back home by working onboard a freighter and arrived in California in the summer of 1926.

Marriage and Life as a Writer
Upon his return, Steinbeck found a job as a caretaker at a vacation home in Lake Tahoe, California. During the two years he spent working there, he was very productive, writing a collection of short stories and completing his first novel, "Cup of Gold." After several rejections, the novel was finally picked up by a publisher in 1929.
Steinbeck worked at a number of jobs to support himself while continuing to write as often as he could. At his job in a fish hatchery, he met Carol Henning, the woman who would become his first wife. They were married in January 1930, following Steinbeck's modest success with his first novel.
When the Great Depression hit, Steinbeck and his wife, unable to find jobs, were forced to give up their apartment. In a show of support for his son's writing career, Steinbeck's father sent the couple a small monthly allowance and allowed them to live rent-free in the family cottage at Pacific Grove on Monterey Bay in California.

Literary Success
The Steinbecks enjoyed life at Pacific Grove, where they made a lifelong friend in neighbor Ed Ricketts. A marine biologist who ran a small laboratory, Ricketts hired Carol to help out with the bookkeeping in his lab.
John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts engaged in lively philosophical discussions, which greatly influenced Steinbeck's worldview. Steinbeck came to see similarities between the behaviors of animals in their environment and those of people in their respective surroundings.
Steinbeck settled into a regular writing routine, with Carol serving as his typist and editor. In 1932, he published his second set of short stories and in 1933, his second novel, "To a God Unknown."
Steinbeck's run of good luck changed, however, when his mother suffered a severe stroke in 1933. He and Carol moved into his parents' house in Salinas to help care for her.
While sitting at his mother's bedside, Steinbeck wrote what would become one of his most popular works — "The Red Pony," which was first published as a short story and later expanded into a novella.
Despite these successes, Steinbeck and his wife struggled financially. When Olive Steinbeck died in 1934, Steinbeck and Carol, along with the elder Steinbeck, moved back into the Pacific Grove house, which required less upkeep than the large house in Salinas.
In 1935, Steinbeck's father died, only five days before the publication of Steinbeck’s novel Tortilla Flat, Steinbeck's first commercial success. Because of the book's popularity, Steinbeck became a minor celebrity, a role he did not relish.

"The Harvest Gypsies"
In 1936, Steinbeck and Carol built a new home in Los Gatos in an attempt to get away from all of the publicity generated by Steinbeck's growing fame. While the house was being built, Steinbeck worked on his novella, "Of Mice and Men."
Steinbeck's next project, assigned by the San Francisco News in 1936, was a seven-part series on the migrant farm workers populating the farming regions of California.
Steinbeck (who titled the series "The Harvest Gypsies") traveled to several squatters' camps, as well as to a government-sponsored "sanitary camp" to gather information for his report. He found appalling conditions in many of the camps, where people were dying of disease and starvation.
John Steinbeck felt great sympathy for the downtrodden and displaced workers, whose ranks now included not only immigrants from Mexico but also American families fleeing the Dust Bowl states.
He decided to write a novel about the Dust Bowl migrants and planned to call it "The Oklahomans." The story was centered on the Joad family, Oklahomans who — like so many others during the Dust Bowl years — were forced to leave their farm to seek a better life in California.

Steinbeck's Masterpiece: 'The Grapes of Wrath'
Steinbeck began work on his new novel in May 1938. He later said that the story was already fully formed in his head before he started writing it.
With Carol's help typing and editing the 750-page manuscript (she also came up with the title), Steinbeck completed "The Grapes of Wrath" in October 1938, exactly 100 days after he had begun. The book was published by Viking Press in April 1939.
"The Grapes of Wrath" caused an uproar among California produce farmers, who claimed that conditions for the migrants were not nearly as bleak as Steinbeck had portrayed them. They accused Steinbeck of being a liar and a communist.
Soon, reporters from newspapers and magazines set out themselves to investigate the camps and found that they were just as dismal as Steinbeck had described. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited several camps and came to the same conclusion.
One of the best-selling books of all time, "The Grapes of Wrath" won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and was made into a successful movie that same year.
Despite Steinbeck's phenomenal success, his marriage suffered from the strain of getting the novel completed. To make matters worse, when Carol became pregnant in 1939, Steinbeck pressured her to terminate the pregnancy. The botched procedure resulted in Carol needing a hysterectomy.

Voyage to Mexico
Weary of all the publicity, Steinbeck and his wife embarked upon a six-week boat voyage to Mexico's Gulf of California in March 1940 with their friend Ed Ricketts. The purpose of the trip was to collect and catalog plant and animal specimens.
The two men published a book about the expedition called "Sea of Cortez." The book was not a commercial success but was praised by some as a significant contribution to marine science.
Steinbeck's wife had come along in hopes of patching up their troubled marriage but to no avail. John and Carol Steinbeck separated in 1941. Steinbeck moved to New York City, where he began dating actress and singer Gwyn Conger, who was 17 years his junior. The Steinbecks divorced in 1943.
One good outcome of the trip came from a story Steinbeck heard in a small village, inspiring him to write one of his best-known novellas: "The Pearl." In the story, a young fisherman's life takes a tragic turn after he finds a valuable pearl. "The Pearl" was also made into a movie.

Steinbeck's Second Marriage
Steinbeck married Gwyn Conger in March 1943 when he was 41 and his new wife a mere 24 years old. Only months after the wedding — and much to his wife's displeasure — Steinbeck took an assignment as a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. His stories covered the human side of World War II, rather than describing actual battles or military maneuvers.
Steinbeck spent several months living alongside American soldiers and was present during combat on numerous occasions.
In August 1944, Gwyn gave birth to son Thom. The family moved into a new home in Monterey in October 1944. Steinbeck began work on his novel, "Cannery Row," a more lighthearted story than his previous works, featuring a main character who was based upon Ed Ricketts. The book was published in 1945.
The family moved back to New York City, where Gwyn gave birth to son John Steinbeck IV in June of 1946. Unhappy in the marriage and longing to return to her career, Gwyn asked Steinbeck for a divorce in 1948 and moved back to California with the boys.
Just prior to his break-up with Gwyn, Steinbeck was devastated to learn of the death of his good friend Ed Ricketts, who had been killed when his car collided with a train in May 1948.

Third Marriage and the Nobel Prize
Steinbeck eventually returned to the family house in Pacific Grove. He was sad and lonely for some time before meeting the woman who became his third wife — Elaine Scott, a successful Broadway stage manager. The two met in California in 1949 and married in 1950 in New York City when Steinbeck was 48 years old and Elaine was 36.
Steinbeck began working on a new novel that he called "The Salinas Valley," later renaming it "East of Eden." Published in 1952, the book became a bestseller. Steinbeck continued to work on novels as well as writing shorter pieces for magazines and newspapers. He and Elaine, based in New York, traveled frequently to Europe and spent nearly a year living in Paris.

Steinbeck's Last Years
Steinbeck remained productive, despite suffering a mild stroke in 1959 and a heart attack in 1961. Also in 1961, Steinbeck published "The Winter of Our Discontent" and a year later, he published "Travels with Charley," a non-fiction book about a road trip he took with his dog.
In October 1962, John Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Some critics believed he didn't deserve the award because his greatest work, "The Grapes of Wrath," had been written so many years before.
Awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor in 1964, Steinbeck himself felt his body of work didn't warrant such recognition.
Weakened by another stroke and two heart attacks, Steinbeck became dependent upon oxygen and nursing care in his home. On Dec. 20, 1968, he died of heart failure at the age of 66."
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John Steinbeck -- Biography by A&E [HIGH QUALITY]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qHsiid98S0

Images:
1. John Steinbeck and his 3rd wife Elaine Anderson
2. John Steinbeck with camera rolling
3. National Steinbeck Center
4. John Steinbeck, with his 19-year-old son John (left), visits his friend, President Lyndon B. Johnson, in the Oval Office, May 16, 1966. John Jr.


Background from {[https://www.steinbeck.org/about-john/biography/]}
Biography
In 1902, Salinas, California was a prosperous farming community, founded about fifty years earlier. Agriculture was the region’s pay dirt. Only fifteen miles from the Pacific, the 50-mile long Salinas Valley was cool and often foggy, temperatures moderate, and the soil rich beyond measure. Ranchers and farmers thrived. Growing wheat and barley in the 19th century, sugar beets in the late 1890s and vegetables and lettuce in the opening decades of the 20th century, growers and shippers’ fortunes would soar during John Steinbeck’s childhood and teens. By the time he went to college in 1919, the valley was about to ship lettuce across America in refrigerated railroad cars. Lettuce became the “green gold” of the Salinas Valley.

John Steinbeck was born in Salinas in 1902, in a stately home on Central Ave (now open as a popular luncheon spot). During his childhood, Salinas had a population of about 5000, was the county seat of Monterey County, and a trading and shipping center for the lower Salinas Valley. 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.” In 1952 he published his epic novel about the Salinas Valley, East of Eden.

In fact, Steinbeck would grow up to tell stories that many area Salinas Valley ranchers and farmers would rather not be told—embedded in his novels was Salinas gossip; his characters were often lonely, misunderstood farmers and ranchers; and in his books, dreams of ordinary workers are dashed—his books tell of failed dreams of land ownership in California. The Grapes of Wrath, his signature novel, published in 1939, traces the journey of the Joad family from Oklahoma to California, where they find not the fabled land of their dreams but a place with few jobs, low wages, and inadequate worker housing. Steinbeck’s novel excoriated the greed of the Associated Farmers, business interests in California. That position did not make him a popular figure in his hometown of Salinas.
Today, Steinbeck’s status has risen in Salinas, and the writer who vowed to put his slice of central California on the map of the world—and did so—who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962; and who put the city of Salinas on the map of the world is a favored son.

The National Steinbeck Center, a museum and cultural center in downtown Salinas, pays tribute to his life and lasting impact on American letters and on American identity. The Steinbeck museum explores his ecological vision, his commitment to social engagement, and his many stories about the working class—all of which insure his work is deeply relevant today. Steinbeck’s books have been published in more than 45 languages, and he is, truly, a citizen of Salinas as well as a citizen of the world.

Early Years: Salinas to Stanford: 1902-1925
When Steinbeck was born, his father, John Ernst Steinbeck, was a manager at Sperry Flour mill in Salinas. His mother had been a school teacher, and she was sturdily committed to literature and intellectual pursuits (Steinbeck claimed that he and his sisters were “blooded with culture.”) He had two older sisters, Esther and Beth, and a younger sister, Mary—the sister he was very close to growing up.
Steinbeck’s childhood was placid enough—although early on he saw himself as an outsider and a rebel. He was a restless and curious child. When he was 11, his father lost his job at Sperry Flour when the plant closed, and Steinbeck felt the deep shame of his father’s loss and subsequent failures as a businessman– a feed and grain store Mr. Steinbeck purchased failed to prosper. Only when young Steinbeck was in college did the family fortunes stabilize and Mr. Steinbeck became Monterey county treasurer.
When he was four, Steinbeck was given his own pony, Jill, an inspiration for his later series of stories, The Red Pony.
John was a reader. On his ninth birthday, his Aunt Mollie gave him a copy of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur: “When I first read it, I must have been already enamored of words because the old and obsolete words delighted me.” Steinbeck and his younger sister Mary would imagine the turrets of Camelot in the sandstone erosions in the Pastures of Heaven, a secluded valley a few miles from Salinas where Aunt Mollie lived. Some twenty years later, Steinbeck would adopt Arthurian tropes and chapter headings in his novel Tortilla Flat. In the late 1950s he and his third wife, Elaine, traveled to England and Wales to research Arthurian legends in preparation for a modernized text of the Arthurian tales. Though the work was never completed in Steinbeck’s lifetime, The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights was published posthumously in 1976.

In early adolescence, John Steinbeck showed a strong interest in writing. 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.” (Valjean 43). 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, hoping to sharpen his writing skills. He took creative writing courses and relished courses in world history. In the summer of 1923, Steinbeck enrolled in a biology course at Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove and there became familiar with the ideas of William Emerson Ritter and found himself especially enamored with Ritter’s concept of the super-organism. (Astro 44) His interest in group behavior informs his fiction of the 1930s, and a growing interest in ecology is articulated most clearly in Sea of Cortez, Steinbeck’s 1941 collaboration with the marine biologist Ed Ricketts. The book is an account of the two men’s 1940 voyage to the Sea of Cortez, collecting marine invertebrates.
He attended Stanford off and on for six years, leaving in 1925 without receiving a degree.

Apprentice years: Cup of Gold (1929) through The Red Pony (1933-34)
In 1926 Steinbeck briefly lived in New York City, attempting to support himself as a manual laborer and journalist. “I had a thin, lonely, hungry time of it” in New York, he wrote in 1935. “And I remember too well the cockroaches under my wash basin and the impossibility of getting a job. I was scared thoroughly. And I can’t forget the scare.” Steinbeck returned to California and settled in Lake Tahoe, where he worked as a caretaker for an estate and later worked at a fish hatchery. There, working long hours during the freezing winters, he finished his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929), a critically and commercially unsuccessful tale based on the life of the privateer Henry Morgan.
There he also met the woman who would become his first wife, Carol Henning. He was working for Tahoe City fish hatchery when Carol walked through the door, captivated by the sign above his office, “Piscatorial Obstetrician.” A native of San Jose, Carol was a perfect companion for the young writer—smart, witty, engaging and outgoing. And she was devoted to his writing. He followed her to San Francisco and then the two moved to Los Angeles, where they married on January 14, 1930. After a few months in Eagle Rock, the couple moved to central California, living in the Steinbeck family summer cottage in Pacific Grove: “Financially we are in a mess,” Steinbeck wrote to a friend, “but ‘spiritually’ we ride the clouds.”
In the little Pacific Grove house, Steinbeck continued to write feverishly while Carol worked at various jobs. He wrote a friend who was also a struggling writer that both of them “take our efforts to write with great seriousness, hammering away for two years on a novel and such things…We have taken the ordinary number of beatings and I don’t think there is much strength in either of us, and still we go on butting our heads against the English Novel and nursing our bruises as though they were the wounds of honorable war.” At that time, Steinbeck was writing his second book (third published) To a God Unknown, a book that had its genesis in a college writing assignment, a play written by a friend. When the friend abandoned the story line, Steinbeck took it up and wrote and rewrote for over four years, shifting the setting to the San Antonio Valley, near King City, where Steinbeck spent some time as a teenager. This powerful, evocative novel was eventually published in 1933.
In March, 1932, Cape and Smith–later rebranded Jonathan Cape and Robert Ballou, Inc.–accepted Steinbeck’s manuscript of The Pastures of Heaven, a loosely connected collection of short stories set in Corral de Tierra, a small farming community between Salinas and Monterey.

The Red Pony stories as well as the short stories later collected in The Long Valley (1938) demonstrate the writer’s growing talent for depicting the region of his birth. All were written in 1933 and ‘34, a time of great pain (his parents were ill) and great creativity. Each of the four Red Pony stories takes place on a Salinas Valley ranch that was partly modeled on a friend’s Salinas ranch, partly on his grandparents’ ranch near King City. These lucid, evocative tales suggest the beauty of the Salinas Valley and tell the story of Jody Tifflin’s expanding awareness of life and death.

Success: Tortilla Flat (1935) through The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
In 1935, Steinbeck enjoyed his first critical and commercial success with the novella Tortilla Flat, a book that chronicles the adventures of Monterey paisanos. The Arthurian tales were his model. In 1942, the novella was adapted as a film starring Spencer Tracy and Hedy Lamarr.
In the late 1930s, Steinbeck wrote three books on labor issues in California, In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and The Grapes of Wrath (1939. The first began as a biography of a strike organizer; Steinbeck ended up writing a novel, however, a searing account of a strike in a California apple orchard. Workers and farmers are pitted against one another, with the communist organizers ruthlessly exploiting the conflict. Steinbeck’s empathy for the workers is palpable, for it is they who suffer most visibly in the strike.
Of Mice and Men is Steinbeck’s first play-novelette, an experimental form he developed. (He wrote two others, The Moon is Down in 1942 and Burning Bright in 1950.) The text of Mice, he hoped, would also be the script for a play—an experiment that failed when it was performed in San Francisco shortly after the book was published. A few months later, Of Mice and Men opened on Broadway, with a revised script by George Kaufman (with Steinbeck’s assistance).
The story is about a pair of migrant workers in California, George Milton and Lennie Small. The two friends depend on one another in a world where most working men are lonely, moving from job to job. Steinbeck called his book a little study in humility—it went on to become one of his most beloved books.

The Grapes of Wrath is Steinbeck’s signature novel, published in 1939. Its roots are journalistic. In the fall of 1936, he was asked by the San Francisco News, a liberal publication, 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.” A fierce sense of outrage informs Steinbeck’s greatest novel, published in April, 1939.
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). In August of 1939 the Kern County Board of Supervisors banned the book from schools and libraries in 1939, a ban that lasted until 1941.
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 March 1940 he and his close friend, marine biologist Ed Ricketts, sailed to the Gulf of California to collect marine specimens. (Carol went along, although she is scarcely mentioned in the subsequent book.) Throughout the 1930s, Ricketts, who collected marine specimens for a living and sold them through his laboratory, Pacific Biological, was a major influence on Steinbeck’s writing and thinking. According to Steinbeck’s loving essay about his friend, “About Ed Ricketts,” the two met in a dentist’s office and immediately struck up a friendship based on mutual admiration for each other. More likely they met at a party, and Steinbeck’s reference to the dentist’s office was an inside joke between the two—Ricketts had bad teeth. As “About Ed Ricketts” demonstrates, their bond was complex and deep from the time they met in 1930 until Ricketts’s death in 1948. (“About Ed Ricketts” was published as an afterword to the Penguin edition of Log from the Sea of Cortez, 1951.)
In 1941, Carol and John separated, divorcing in 1943. Shortly thereafter Steinbeck married Gwedolyn “Gwyn” Conger, with whom he would have his only children, Thomas and John Steinbeck Jr.

War Years: 1943-1945
Steinbeck was a patriot, as were many Americans after Pearl Harbor, as the U.S. entered World War II. Denied a commission in the armed forces because of his suspected communist leanings—he was investigated by the FBI after the publication of Grapes—Steinbeck devoted himself to writing propaganda for the war effort. He followed a bomber team around American, recording their training regime in Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team (1942). That same year he published another play-novelette, 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 ofThe Moon is Down.
He also wrote a film treatment called “Lifeboat,” about a stranded group in the Atlantic. Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Lifeboat, based on Steinbeck’s film treatment was released in 1944. Since substantial changes were made to his script, Steinbeck unsuccessfully petitioned to have his name removed from Hitchcock’s film.
Shortly after marrying Gwyn in 1943, Steinbeck was hired by the New York Herald Tribune to report on the war in Europe. He went first to England, then North Africa, and then joined a commando unit led by Douglas Fairbanks Jr., their mission diversionary tactics off the coast of Italy. Steinbeck threw himself into the war effort, and his letters to Gwyn during this period reflect his patriotism as well as fascination with ordinary lives:
“I see these thousands of soldiers here and they are going through the same thing. There’s a kind of walk they have in London, an apathetic shuffle. They’re looking for something. They’ll say it’s a girl—any girl, but it isn’t that at all.”
In 1958 Steinbeck’s war correspondence was published as Once There Was a War. Writing to a friend, 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.”

The Post-war years: 1945-1951
“I have been working madly at a book and Gwyn has been working calmly at a baby,” Steinbeck wrote to a friend in 1944, “and it looks as though it might be a photo finish.” Cannery Row was published 1945 and Thomas Steinbeck was born in 1944.
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.
After the end of the war, Steinbeck published The Pearl , an elaboration on a story he had heard in La Paz during his trip with Ed Ricketts to the Gulf of California. While traveling to Mexico to help with the film adaptation of the novel, Steinbeck became inspired by the story of Emiliano Zapata, and subsequently wrote a screenplay based on his life. Viva Zapata was directed by Elia Kazan and starred Marlon Brando and Anthony Quinn in 1952.
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 writes in “About Ed Ricketts.” “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.” (Shortly before Ricketts’s death, Steinbeck and Ricketts had planned another collecting expedition together, this time to British Columbia. The resulting book was to be called The Outer Shores and would have focused on marine life near Alaska.
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 depression. In 1948 he returned to the cabin in Pacific Grove and threw himself into his work.

The 1950s and 1960s
In 1949, the actress Ann Sothern visited Steinbeck in Pacific Grove over Memorial Day weekend. She brought along a friend, Elaine Scott, who would become Steinbeck’s third and final wife. Less than a week after Elaine’s divorce from the actor Zachary Scott became final, the couple married on December 28, 1950. Later they moved into 206 East 72nd Street in New York City, Steinbeck’s home for the next 13 years.
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. As he explained to Pascal Covici in the diary he wrote concurrently with the novel (later published as Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters), Steinbeck addressed East of Eden to his sons:
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, I want to tell them directly, and perhaps by speaking directly to them I shall speak directly to other people… And so I will tell them one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest story of all—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. Stories of the Hamilton family are paired with the a “symbolic story” of the Trask family, a rewriting of the Cain and Abel biblical story. 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 his second wife, 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. Shortly after, Elia Kazan directed the film version of the final part of the novel, which starred James Dean in his debut performance.
Steinbeck traveled widely with his third wife, Elaine, and he supported himself writing journalism about his travels.
In the late 1950s he turned to one of his life-long ambitions, to write a translation of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur for twentieth century readers. To facilitate his research, Steinbeck spent ten months in Somerset, England with Elaine, gathering material and working on the translation. The work was never completed in Steinbeck’s lifetime.
When he returned to America from England in late 1959, he was distressed by what he felt were America’s moral lapses. Out of that distress (the quiz show scandal was breaking news), he wrote a novel about a man’s own moral quandary, The Winter of Our Discontent (1961).
Publication of that novel earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he was awarded for his body of work in 1962. His is “realistic and imaginative writing, combining as it does sympathetic humor and social perception,” said Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy Anders Osterling in his presentation speech.
That year also saw publication of one of his most endearing books, Travels with Charley (1962). “I’m going to learn about my own country,” Steinbeck wrote to a friend, before he began his trip around America. He felt that he had lost touch with his own country:
I, an American writer, writing about America, was working from memory, and the memory at best is a faulty, warpy reservoir. I had not heard the speech of America, smelled the grass and trees and sewage, seen its hills and water, its color and quality of light. I knew the changes only from books and newspapers. But more than this, I had not felt the country for twenty-five years.
Travels with Charley chronicles this trip of roughly 10,000 miles across the United States, from Maine to California, to Texas and into the racial tension of the south—the most searing moments in the book. The often elegiac tone of the work marks shift from Steinbeck’s previous work, and some critics were disappointed. However, in writing about America from a distinctly observational but highly sympathetic standpoint, Steinbeck returns to familiar ground.
In 1964, Steinbeck was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson, with whom the writer was personally acquainted.
His final book of the 1960s was America and Americans (1966), a book of essays about the American character and the common good. Topics considered include ethnicity, race, and the environment; it is a text relevant to the twenty-first century.
Steinbeck was, throughout his career, curious and engaged, a writer to the end. 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, a series called “Letters to Alicia.” 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. As his wife Elaine said, Steinbeck changed his mind about the wisdom of the Vietnam war, but he did not live long enough to write more about that war.
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.

FYI LTC John Shaw 1SG Steven ImermanGySgt Gary CordeiroSMSgt Tom BurnsSgt Jim BelanusSGM Bill FrazerSGT Randell Rose[SGT Denny EspinosaA1C Riley SandersSSgt Clare MaySSG Robert WebsterCSM Chuck StaffordPFC Craig KarshnerSFC Bernard WalkoSPC Nancy GreenePVT Mark Zehner Lt Col Charlie BrownSP5 Dennis Loberger SSG Robert Mark Odom LTC Ken Connolly

LTC Stephen F. Excellent share sir.

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