1. John Steinbeck's World
Introduction
John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr., was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California. He came
from a family of moderate 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 was the treasurer of Monterrey County. His mother, Olive Hamilton Steinbeck, was a
former school teacher, who shared Steinbeck's passion of reading and writing. Steinbeck was
of German, English, and Irish descent. Johann Adolf Großsteinbeck, Steinbeck's paternal
grandfather, had shortened the family name to Steinbeck when he emigrated to the United
States. The family farm in Heiligenhaus, Mettmann, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, is
still today named "Großsteinbeck.". Steinbeck grew up in the beautiful, fertile Salinas Valley,
and most of his memorable novels and short stories would be set in California.
Early years
For the most part Steinbeck, who grew up with three sisters, had a happy childhood. He was
shy but smart and early in his life formed an appreciation for the land, and in particular
California's Salinas Valley, which would greatly inform his later writing. Steinbeck often
locked himself in his bedroom to write poems and stories and he made the decision at the age
of 14 to become a writer. He viewed himself strictly as a writer, and his decision to go to
Stanford was made more to please his parents than anything else. In 1919 Steinbeck enrolled
at Stanford University, but Steinbeck seems to have had little use for college. Over the next
six years Steinbeck drifted in out of school and later in 1925, he eventually dropping out for
good in 1925 without a degree. He dropped out of college and worked as a manual labourer
before achieving success as a writer.
Career
John Steinbeck was an American novelist. As a novelist, he often dealt with social and
economic issues in his life as well as in his works. Steinbeck tried to make a go of it as a
freelance writer after he leaves Stanford and move to New York, but he failed and returned to
California. He wrote his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929) when he took a job as a caretaker in
Lake Tahoe, California. The story is based on the life and death of privateer Henry Morgan.
2. In the same year and place also, he met his first wife, Carol Henning. Steinbeck and Henning
were married in January 1930. With the full support of his wife has influenced him to
continue writing many works. The Pastures of Heaven, published in 1932, comprised twelve
interconnected stories about a valley near Monterey, that was discovered by a Spanish
corporal while chasing runaway American Indian slaves. In 1933 Steinbeck published The
Red Pony, a 100-page, four-chapter story weaving in memories of Steinbeck's childhood and
then a story entitled To a God Unknown follows the life of a homesteader and his family in
California, depicting a character with a primal and pagan worship of the land he works.
Steinbeck achieved his first critical success with Tortilla Flat (1935), a novel that won the
California Commonwealth Club's Gold Medal. It portrays the adventures of a group of
classless and usually homeless young men in Monterey after World War I, just before U.S.
prohibition.
All Steinbeck's novels can be classified as social novels dealing with the economic problems
of rural labour, but there is also a streak of worship of the soil in his books, which does not
always agree with his matter-of-fact sociological approach. After the rough and earthy
humour of Tortilla Flat, he moved on to serious fiction that related to social criticism. his
first serious fiction is In Dubious Battle (1936), which deals with the strikes of the migratory
fruit pickers on California plantations. This was followed by Of Mice and Men (1937), the
story of the imbecile giant Lennie, and a series of admirable short stories collected in the
volume The Long Valley (1938). In 1939 he published what is considered his best work, The
Grapes of Wrath, the story of Oklahoma tenant farmers who, unable to earn a living from the
land, moved to California where they became migratory workers.
Later life
In 1942, Steinbeck's divorce from Henning became final and later that month he married
Gwyndolyn "Gwyn" Conger. In May 1948, Steinbeck travelled to California on an
emergency trip to be with his friend Ed Ricketts, who had been seriously injured when his car
was struck by a train. Ricketts died hours before Steinbeck arrived. On returning home from
this devastating trip, Steinbeck was meet by Gwyn, who told him she wanted a divorce for
various reasons related to estrangement. She could not be dissuaded, and the divorce became
final in August. 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, within a week of the finalizing of Scott's own divorce
3. from actor Zachary Scott. This third marriage for Steinbeck lasted until his death in 1968. In
1966, Steinbeck traveled to Tel Aviv to visit the site of Mount Hope, a farm community
established in Israel by his grandfather, whose brother, Friedrich Grosssteinbeck, was
murdered by Arab marauders in 1858. John Steinbeck died in New York City on December
20, 1968 of heart disease and congestive heart failure when he was 66 years old.
Noble prizes
In 1962, Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for literature for his realistic and imaginative writing,
combining with sympathetic humor and enthusiastic social perception. However, when he
was asked by a reporter at a press conference given by his publisher, if he thought he
deserved the Nobel, he frankly said no.
"The writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of
heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war
against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold
that a writer who does not believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any
membership in literature."
—Steinbeck Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
He also said in his speech, "Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope.
So that today, St. John the apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the
Word is Man—and the Word is with Men."
Although he is very humble to believe his talent as a writer, Steinbeck talked openly of his
own admiration of certain writers. In 1953, he wrote that he considered cartoonist Al Capp,
creator of the satirical Li'l Abner, as a possibly the best writer in the world today. At his own
first Nobel Prize press conference he stated that he likes Hemingway and Faulkner works.
In September 1964, Steinbeck was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President
Lyndon B. Johnson. In 1967, at the behest of Newsday magazine, Steinbeck went to Vietnam
to report on the war there. Thinking of the Vietnam War as a heroic venture, he was
considered a hawk for his position on that war. His sons both served in Vietnam prior to his
death, and Steinbeck visited one son in the battlefield. After Steinbeck's death, his incomplete
4. novel based on the King Arthur legends of Malory and others, The Acts of King Arthur and
His Noble Knights, was finally published in 1976.
The History of the story Of Mice and Men
Of Mice and Men is a tragedy that was written in the form of a play in 1937. The story is
about the dreams of a pair of migrant agricultural labourers in California, George and Lennie,
who are trying to work up enough money to buy their own farm or ranch. As it is set in
1930's America, it provides an insight into The Great Depression, encompassing themes of
racism, loneliness, prejudice against the mentally ill, and the struggle for personal
independence. This story is written through Steinbeck's experience in life. Steinbeck lived in
a small rural town that was essentially a frontier settlement, set amid some of the world's
most fertile land. He spent his summers working on nearby ranches and later with migrant
workers on Spreckels ranch. He explored his surroundings, walking across local forests,
fields, and farms. As a result, he became aware of the harsher aspects of migrant life and the
darker side of human nature, which supplied him with material expressed in such works like
Of Mice and Men.
Conclusion
John Steinbeck used most of his experience in his life to create wonderful masterpieces in his
writing works. His works also is used to highlight the issues that raised among the society on
that era. With his talent in delivering messages through pieces of writing, he believes it will
help him to portray his voice so that people will realized and learn something from him, as a
saying goes, his pen is mightier than many swords.
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