John Steinbeck
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. (February 27, 1902 – December 20,
1968) was an American author of twenty-seven books, including sixteen
novels, six non-fiction books, and five collections of short stories. He
is widely known for the
Pulitzer Prize-winning novel
The Grapes of Wrath (1939),
East of Eden (1952) and the novella
Of Mice and Men (1937). Steinbeck received the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962 "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception".
Early life
John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was born on February 27, 1902, in
Salinas, California. He was of German, English, and Irish descent.
[2]
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."
His father, John Ernst Steinbeck, served as
Monterey County treasurer. John's mother, Olive Hamilton, a former school teacher, shared Steinbeck's passion for reading and writing.
[3] The Steinbecks were members of the
Episcopal Church,
[4] although Steinbeck would later become an agnostic.
[5] Steinbeck lived in a small rural town, no more than a frontier settlement, set in some of the world's most fertile land.
[6] He spent his summers working on nearby ranches and later with migrant workers on
Spreckels
sugar beet farms. There 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 as
Of Mice and Men.
[6] He also explored his surroundings, walking across local forests, fields, and farms.
[6] While working at Spreckels Sugar Company, he would sometimes work in their laboratory, which gave him time to write.
[7] He also had considerable mechanical aptitude and fondness for making his own repairs to things he owned.
[7]
Steinbeck graduated from Salinas High School in 1919 and went from there to study English Literature at
Stanford University in
Palo Alto,
leaving, without a degree, in 1925. He traveled to New York City where
he took odd jobs while trying to write. When he failed to have his work
published, he returned to California and worked in 1928 as a tour guide
and caretaker
[7] at
Lake Tahoe, where he met Carol Henning, his first wife.
[3][7][8] The two were married in January 1930 in
Los Angeles, where, with friends, he attempted to make money manufacturing plaster
mannequins.
[7]
When their money ran out six months later, Steinbeck and Carol moved back to
Pacific Grove, California, to a cottage owned by his father, on the
Monterey Peninsula a few blocks from the border of the city of
Monterey, California.
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 this period of 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, as well as
fresh vegetables from his garden and local farms. When that didn't work,
he was not above getting welfare, or rarely even stealing food from the
local produce market.
[7] Whatever food they had, they would share with their friends.
[7] Carol became the model for Mary Talbot in Steinbeck's novel
Cannery Row.
[7]
In 1930, Steinbeck met
Ed Ricketts, who became a close friend and a philosophical and biological mentor to Steinbeck during the following decade.
[7]
Usually very quiet, yet likable, with an inner self-sufficiency and an
encyclopedic knowledge of diverse subjects, Ricketts became a focus of
Steinbeck's attention. Ricketts had taken a college class from
Warner C. Allee,
a biologist and ecological theorist, who would go on to write a classic
early textbook on ecology. Ricketts became an exponent of ecological
thinking, in which man was only one part of a great chain of being,
caught in a web of life too large for him to control or understand.
[7] Meanwhile, Ricketts operated a biological lab on the coast of Monterrey, selling biological samples to schools and colleges.
Between the years 1930 to 1936, Steinbeck and Ricketts became close
friends. In the lab were small animals, fish, rays, starfish, turtles
and other marine forms. Steinbeck's wife began working at the lab as
secretary-bookeeper.
[7] Steinbeck himself began helping out on an informal basis.
[7] They formed a common bond based on their love of music and art, and John learned biology and Ricketts' ecological philosophy.
[7] When Steinbeck had emotional upsets, Ricketts would sometimes play music for him.
[7]
Career
Writing
Steinbeck's first novel,
Cup of Gold, published in 1929, is based on the life and death of
privateer Henry Morgan. It centers on Morgan's assault and sacking of the city of
Panama, sometimes referred to as the 'Cup of Gold', and on the woman, fairer than the sun, who was said to be found there.
[9]
After
Cup of Gold, between 1930 and 1933 Steinbeck produced three shorter works.
The Pastures of Heaven, published in 1932, consists of twelve interconnected stories about a valley near Monterey, which was discovered by a Spanish
corporal while chasing runaway
Indian slaves. In 1933 Steinbeck published
The Red Pony, a 100-page, four-chapter story weaving in memories of Steinbeck's childhood.
[9] To a God Unknown, named after a Vedic hymn,
[7] 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. Although he still had not achieved
the status of a well-known writer, he never doubted that he would
achieve greatness.
[7]
Steinbeck achieved his first critical success with
Tortilla Flat (1935), a novel set in post-war Monterey, California, that won the California
Commonwealth Club's Gold Medal.
[9] 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.
They are portrayed in ironic comparison to mythic knights on a quest
and reject nearly all the standard mores of American society in
enjoyment of a dissolute life centered around wine, lust, camaraderie
and petty theft. In presenting the 1962 Nobel Prize to Steinbeck, the
Swedish Academy cited "spicy and comic tales about a gang of
paisanos, asocial individuals who, in their wild revels, are almost caricatures of
King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table.
It has been said that in the United States this book came as a welcome
antidote to the gloom of the then prevailing depression."
[1] Tortilla Flat was adapted as a
1942 film of the same name, starring
Spencer Tracy,
Hedy Lamarr and
John Garfield, a friend of Steinbeck's. With some of the proceeds he built a summer ranch-home in
Los Gatos.
[citation needed]
Steinbeck began to write a series of "California novels" and
Dust Bowl fiction, set among common people during the
Great Depression. These included
In Dubious Battle,
Of Mice and Men and
The Grapes of Wrath.
Of Mice and Men was a
drama about the dreams of a pair of migrant agricultural laborers in California. It was critically acclaimed
[9] and Steinbeck's 1962 Nobel Prize citation called it a "little masterpiece".
[1] Its stage production was a hit, starring
Wallace Ford as George and starring
Broderick Crawford
as George's companion - the mentally childlike but physically powerful
itinerant farmhand Lennie. Steinbeck refused to travel from his home in
California to attend any performance of the play during its New York
run, telling director
George S. Kaufman
that the play as it existed in his own mind was "perfect" and that
anything presented on stage would only be a disappointment. Steinbeck
would write two more stage plays (
The Moon Is Down and
Burning Bright).
Of Mice and Men was also adapted as a
1939 Hollywood film, with
Lon Chaney, Jr. as Lennie (he had filled the role in the Los Angeles stage production) and
Burgess Meredith as George.
[10] Meredith and Steinbeck became close friends for the next two decades.
[7] Another film based on the novella was made in 1992 starring Gary Sinise as George and John Malkovich as Lennie.
Steinbeck followed this wave of success with
The Grapes of Wrath
(1939), based on newspaper articles about migrant agricultural workers
that he had written in San Francisco. It is commonly considered his
greatest work. According to
The New York Times, it was the best-selling book of 1939 and 430,000 copies had been printed by February 1940. In that month it won the
National Book Award, favorite fiction book of 1939, voted by members of the
American Booksellers Association.
[11] Later that year it won the
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction[12] and it was adapted as a film directed by
John Ford, starring
Henry Fonda as Tom Joad; Fonda was nominated for the best actor Academy Award.
Grapes was controversial. Steinbeck's
New Deal
political views, negative portrayal of aspects of capitalism, and
sympathy for the plight of workers, led to a backlash against the
author, especially close to home.
[13] Claiming the book was both obscene and misrepresented conditions in the county, the
Kern County Board of Supervisors banned the book from the county's publicly funded schools and libraries in August 1939. This ban lasted until January 1941.
[14]
Of the controversy, Steinbeck wrote, "The vilification of me out here
from the large landowners and bankers is pretty bad. The latest is a
rumor started by them that the
Okies
hate me and have threatened to kill me for lying about them. I'm
frightened at the rolling might of this damned thing. It is completely
out of hand; I mean a kind of hysteria about the book is growing that is
not healthy."
The film versions of
The Grapes of Wrath and
Of Mice and Men (by two different movie studios) were in production simultaneously, allowing Steinbeck to spend a full day on the set of
The Grapes of Wrath and the next day on the set of
Of Mice and Men.
Ed Ricketts
In the 1930s and 1940s,
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
[15] and to collect biological specimens, which Ricketts sold for a living. Their joint book about a collecting expedition to the
Gulf of California
in 1940, which was part travelogue and part natural history, published
just as the U.S. entered World War II, never found an audience and did
not sell well.
[15] However, in 1951, Steinbeck republished the narrative portion of the book as
The Log from the Sea of Cortez, under his name only (though Ricketts had written some of it). This work remains in print today.
[16]
Although Carol accompanied Steinbeck on the trip, their marriage was
beginning to suffer, and ended a year later, in 1941, even as Steinbeck
worked on the manuscript for the book.
[7] In 1942, after his divorce from Carol he married Gwyndolyn "Gwyn" Conger.
[17] With his second wife Steinbeck had two sons—
Thomas ("Thom") Myles Steinbeck (born 1944) and
John Steinbeck IV (1946–1991).
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). Ecological themes recur in Steinbeck's novels of the period.
[18]
Steinbeck's close relations with Ricketts ended in 1941 when
Steinbeck moved away from Pacific Grove and divorced his wife Carol.
[15] Ricketts' biographer Eric Enno Tamm notes that, except for
East of Eden (1952), Steinbeck's writing declined after Ricketts' untimely death in 1948.
[18]
1940s–1960s work
Steinbeck's novel
The Moon Is Down (1942), about the
Socrates-inspired spirit of resistance in an occupied village in
Northern Europe, was made into a film almost immediately. It was presumed that the unnamed country of the novel was Norway and
the occupiers the Nazis, and in 1945 Steinbeck received the
Haakon VII Cross of freedom 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).
[19] 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 helped capture Italian and German prisoners,
using a Tommy Gun. Some of his writings from this period were
incorporated in the documentary
Once There Was a War (1958).
Steinbeck returned from the war with a number of wounds from
shrapnel and some psychological trauma. He treated himself, as ever, by writing. He wrote
Alfred Hitchcock's
Lifeboat (1944), and the film
A Medal for Benny (1945) with screenwriter
Jack Wagner about
paisanos from
Tortilla Flat going to war. He later requested that his name be removed from the credits of
Lifeboat
because he believed the final version of the film had racist
undertones. In 1944, suffering from homesickness for his Pacific
Grove/Monterey life of the 1930s, he wrote
Cannery Row (1945) which became so famous that Ocean View Avenue in
Monterey, the location of the book, was eventually renamed Cannery Row in 1958.
After the end of the war, he wrote
The Pearl (1947), already knowing it would be filmed. The story first appeared in the December 1945 issue of
Woman's Home Companion magazine as "The Pearl of the World." It was illustrated by
John Alan Maxwell. The novel is an imaginative telling of a story which Steinbeck had heard in La Paz in 1940, as related in
The Log From the Sea of Cortez,
which he described in Chapter 11 as being "so much like a parable that
it almost can't be". Steinbeck traveled to Mexico for the filming with
Wagner who helped with the script; on this trip he would be inspired by
the story of
Emiliano Zapata, and subsequently wrote a film script (
Viva Zapata!) directed by
Elia Kazan and starring
Marlon Brando and
Anthony Quinn.
In 1947, Steinbeck made the first of many trips to the
Soviet Union, this one with photographer
Robert Capa. They visited
Moscow,
Kiev,
Tbilisi,
Batumi and
Stalingrad, some of the first Americans to visit many parts of the USSR since the
communist revolution. Steinbeck's 1948 book about their experiences,
A Russian Journal, was illustrated with Capa's photos. In 1948, the year the book was published, Steinbeck was elected to the
American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In 1952 Steinbeck's longest novel -
East of Eden - was published. According to his third wife, Elaine, he considered it his
magnum opus - his greatest novel.
In 1952, John Steinbeck appeared as the on-screen narrator of
20th Century Fox's film,
O. Henry's Full House.
Although Steinbeck later admitted he was uncomfortable before the
camera, he provided interesting introductions to several filmed
adaptations of short stories by the legendary writer
O. Henry. About the same time, Steinbeck recorded readings of several of his short stories for
Columbia Records; despite some stiffness, the recordings provide a record of Steinbeck's deep, resonant voice.
Following the success of
Viva Zapata!, Steinbeck collaborated with Kazan on
East of Eden,
James Dean's film debut.
Rocinante, camper truck in which Steinbeck traveled across the United States in 1960
Travels with Charley (subtitle: In Search of America) is a travelogue of his 1960
road trip with his
poodle
Charley. Steinbeck bemoans his lost youth and roots, while dispensing
both criticism and praise for America. According to Steinbeck's son
Thom, Steinbeck went on the trip because he knew he was dying and wanted
to see the country one last time.
[20]
Steinbeck's last novel,
The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), examines
moral decline in America. The protagonist Ethan grows discontented with his own moral decline and that of those around him.
[21] The book is very different in tone from Steinbeck's amoral and ecological stance in earlier works like
Tortilla Flat and
Cannery Row.
It was not a critical success. Many reviewers recognized the importance
of the novel but were disappointed that it was not another
Grapes of Wrath.
[21]
In the Nobel Prize presentation speech next year, however, the Swedish
Academy cited it most favorably: "Here he attained the same standard
which he set in The Grapes of Wrath. Again he holds his position as an
independent expounder of the truth with an unbiased instinct for what is
genuinely American, be it good or bad."
[1]
Apparently taken aback by the critical reception of this novel, and
the critical outcry when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 1962,
[22] Steinbeck published no more fiction in the next six years before his death.
Nobel Prize
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.
[22]
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
philosophising", noting that "[T]he international character of the award
and the weight attached to it raise questions about the mechanics of
selection and how close the Nobel committee is to the main currents of
American writing.... [W]e think it interesting that the laurel was not
awarded to a writer ... whose significance, influence and sheer body of
work had already made a more profound impression on the literature of
our age".
[22] Steinbeck himself, when asked on the day of the announcement if he deserved the Nobel, replied: "Frankly, no."
[7][22]
Biographer Jackson Benson notes, "[T]his honor was one of the few in
the world that one could not buy nor gain by political maneuver. It was
precisely because the committee made its judgment ... on its own
criteria, rather than plugging into 'the main currents of American
writing' as defined by the critical establishment, that the award had
value."
[7][22] In his acceptance speech later in the year in Stockholm, he said:
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
[23]
In 2012, (50 years later), the Nobel Prize opened its archives and it
was revealed that Steinbeck was a "compromise choice" among a shortlist
consisting of Steinbeck, British authors
Robert Graves and
Lawrence Durrell, French dramatist
Jean Anouilh and Danish author
Karen Blixen.
[22] The declassified documents showed that he was chosen as the best of a bad lot,
[22]
"There aren't any obvious candidates for the Nobel prize and the prize
committee is in an unenviable situation," wrote committee member
Henry Olsson.
[22] Although the committee believed Steinbeck's best work was behind him by 1962, committee member
Anders Österling believed the release of his new novel
The Winter of Our Discontent
in 1961 showed that "after some signs of slowing down in recent years,
[Steinbeck has] regained his position as a social truth-teller [and is
an] authentic realist fully equal to his predecessors Sinclair Lewis and
Ernest Hemingway."
[22]
Although modest about his own 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, "possibly the best writer in the world today."
[24] At his own first Nobel Prize press conference he was asked his favorite authors and works and replied: "
Hemingway's short stories and nearly everything
Faulkner wrote."
[7]
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 (at one
point being allowed to man a machine-gun watch position at night at a
firebase, while his son and other members of his platoon slept).
[25]
Personal life
In May 1948, Steinbeck went back 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. Upon returning home, Steinbeck was confronted by Gwyn, who
asked for a divorce, which became final in August. Steinbeck spent the
year after Ricketts' death in deep depression.
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 from actor
Zachary Scott. This third (and final) marriage for Steinbeck lasted until his death in 1968.
[9]
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 in what became known as the
Outrages at Jaffa.
[26]
Death and legacy
The Steinbeck family graves in the Hamilton plot at the Salinas Cemetery
John Steinbeck died 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.
[9]
In accordance with his wishes, his body was cremated, and interred (March 4, 1969)
[27]
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. He had earlier written to his doctor that he felt deeply
"in his flesh" that he would not survive his physical death, and that
the biological end of his life was the final end to it.
[15]
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." But he asserted that "Steinbeck didn't need the Nobel Prize— the Nobel judges needed him."
Steinbeck's incomplete novel based on the
King Arthur legends of Malory and others,
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, was published in 1976.
Many of Steinbeck's works are on required reading lists in American high schools. In the United Kingdom,
Of Mice and Men is one of the key texts used by the examining body
AQA for its
English Literature GCSE. A study by the Center for the Learning and Teaching of Literature in the United States found that
Of Mice and Men was one of the ten most frequently read books in public high schools.
[28]
At the same time,
The Grapes of Wrath has been
banned by school boards: in August 1939,
Kern County Board of Supervisors banned the book from the county's publicly funded schools and libraries.
[14] It was burned in Salinas on two different occasions.
[29][30] In 2003, a school board in
Mississippi banned it on the grounds of profanity.
[31] According to the
American Library Association Steinbeck was one of the ten most frequently banned authors from 1990 to 2004, with
Of Mice and Men ranking sixth out of 100 such books in the United States.
[32][33]
Literary influences
Steinbeck grew up in California's Salinas Valley, a culturally
diverse place with a rich migratory and immigrant history. This
upbringing imparted a regionalistic flavor to his writing, giving many
of his works a distinct
sense of place.
[6][9] Salinas, Monterey and parts of the
San Joaquin Valley were the setting for many of his stories. The area is now sometimes referred to as "Steinbeck Country".
[15]
Most of his early work dealt with subjects familiar to him from his formative years. An exception was his first novel,
Cup of Gold, which concerns the pirate
Henry Morgan, whose adventures had captured Steinbeck's imagination as a child.
In his subsequent novels, Steinbeck found a more authentic voice by
drawing upon direct memories of his life in California. His childhood
friend,
Max Wagner, a brother of Jack Wagner and who later became a film actor, served as inspiration for
The Red Pony.
Later he used real American historical conditions and events in the
first half of the 20th century, which he had experienced first-hand as a
reporter. Steinbeck often populated his stories with struggling
characters; his works examined the lives of the working class and
migrant workers during the
Dust Bowl and the
Great Depression.
His later work reflected his wide range of interests, including
marine biology, politics, religion, history and
mythology. One of his last published works was
Travels with Charley, a
travelogue of a
road trip he took in 1960 to rediscover America.
Commemoration
Steinbeck's
boyhood home, a turreted
Victorian
building in downtown Salinas, has been preserved and restored by the
Valley Guild, a nonprofit organization. Fixed menu lunches are served
Monday through Saturday, and the house is open for
tours during the summer on Sunday afternoons.
[34]
The
National Steinbeck Center, two blocks away at 1
Main Street is the only museum in the U.S. dedicated to a single author. Dana Gioia (chair of the
National Endowment for the Arts)
told an audience at the center, "This is really the best modern
literary shrine in the country, and I've seen them all." Its
"Steinbeckiana" includes "Rocinante," the camper-truck in which
Steinbeck made the cross-country trip described in "Travels with
Charley."
His father's cottage on Eleventh Street in Pacific Grove, where Steinbeck wrote some of his earliest books, also survives.
[15]
In Monterey,
Ed Ricketts' laboratory survives (though it is not yet open to the public) and at the corner which Steinbeck describes in
Cannery Row,
also the store which once belonged to Lee Chong, and the adjacent
vacant lot frequented by the hobos of Cannery Row. The site of the
Hovden Sardine Cannery next to Doc's laboratory is now occupied by the
Monterey Bay Aquarium. However, the street that Steinbeck described as "Cannery Row" in the novel, once named
Ocean View Avenue, was renamed
Cannery Row
in honor of the novel, in 1958. The town of Monterey has commemorated
Steinbeck's work with an avenue of flags depicting characters from
Cannery Row, historical plaques, and sculptured busts depicting Steinbeck and Ricketts.
[15]
On February 27, 1979 (the 77th anniversary of the writer's birth), the
United States Postal Service issued a stamp featuring Steinbeck, starting the Postal Service’s Literary Arts series honoring American writers.
[35]
On December 5, 2007, California Governor
Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady
Maria Shriver inducted Steinbeck into the
California Hall of Fame, located at
the California Museum for History, Women and the Arts.
[36] His son, author
Thomas Steinbeck, accepted the award on his behalf.
To commemorate the 112th anniversary of Mr. Steinbeck's birthday on
February 27, 2014, Google displayed an interactive doodle utilizing
animation which included illustrations portraying scenes and quotes from
several novels by the author.
[37][38][39]
Political views
John Steinbeck, with his 19-year-old son John (left), visits his friend,
President Johnson, in the Oval Office, May 16, 1966. John Jr. is shortly to leave for active duty in Vietnam.
Steinbeck's contacts with
leftist authors, journalists, and
labor union figures may have influenced his writing and he joined the
League of American Writers, a Communist organization, in 1935.
[40] Steinbeck was mentored by radical writers
Lincoln Steffens and his wife
Ella Winter. Through
Francis Whitaker, a member of the
Communist Party USA’s
John Reed Club for writers, Steinbeck met with strike organizers from the
Cannery and Agricultural Workers' Industrial Union.
[41] In 1939, he signed a letter with some other writers in support of the
Soviet invasion of Finland and the Soviet-established
puppet government.
[42]
Documents released by the
Central Intelligence Agency
in 2012 indicate that Steinbeck offered his services to the Agency in
1952, while planning a European tour, and the Director of Central
Intelligence himself,
Walter Bedell Smith, was eager to take him up on the offer.
[43]
What work, if any, Steinbeck may have performed for the CIA during the
Cold War is unknown, but the correspondence itself is curious, given his
earlier history with leftist organizations and individuals.
Steinbeck was a close associate of
playwright Arthur Miller. In June 1957, Steinbeck took a personal and professional risk by standing up for him when Miller refused to name names in the
House Un-American Activities Committee trials.
[29] Steinbeck called the period one of the "strangest and most frightening times a government and people have ever faced."
[29]
In 1967, when he was sent to Vietnam to report on the
war, his sympathetic portrayal of the
United States Army led the
New York Post to denounce him for betraying his liberal past. Steinbeck's biographer,
Jay Parini, says Steinbeck's friendship with
President Lyndon B. Johnson influenced his views on Vietnam.
[9] Steinbeck may also have been concerned about the safety of his son serving in Vietnam.
[citation needed]
Government harassment
Steinbeck complained publicly about government harassment. Thomas Steinbeck, the author's eldest son, said that
J. Edgar Hoover, director of the
FBI at the time, could find no basis for prosecuting Steinbeck and therefore 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. According to Thomas, a true artist is one who "without a thought
for self, stands up against the stones of condemnation, and speaks for
those who are given no real voice in the halls of justice, or the halls
of government. By doing so these people will naturally become the
enemies of the political status quo."
[44]
In a 1942 letter to United States Attorney General
Francis Biddle,
he 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."
[45] The FBI denied that Steinbeck was under investigation.
Major works
In Dubious Battle
In 1936, Steinbeck published the first of what came to be known as his Dustbowl trilogy, which included
Of Mice and Men and
The Grapes of Wrath.
This first novel tells the story of a fruit pickers' strike in
California which is both aided and damaged by the help of "the Party,"
generally taken to be the
Communist Party, although this is never spelled out in the book.
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 two traveling ranch workers, George
and Lennie, trying to work up enough money to buy their own farm/ranch.
As it is set in 1930s 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. Along
with
The Grapes of Wrath,
East of Eden, and
The Pearl,
Of Mice and Men is one of Steinbeck's best known works. It was made into a movie three times,
in 1939 starring
Burgess Meredith,
Lon Chaney Jr., and
Betty Field, in 1982 starring
Randy Quaid,
Robert Blake and
Ted Neeley, and
in 1992 starring
Gary Sinise and
John Malkovich.
The Grapes of Wrath
The
Grapes of Wrath is set in the
Great Depression and describes a family of
sharecroppers, the Joads, who were driven from their land due to the dust storms of the
Dust Bowl. The title is a reference to the
Battle Hymn of the Republic.
Some critics found it too sympathetic to the workers' plight and too
critical of capitalism but it found quite a large audience in the
working class.
[citation needed] It won both the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for fiction (novels) and was adapted as a
film starring
Henry Fonda and directed by
John Ford.
East of Eden
Steinbeck deals with the nature of good and evil in this Salinas
Valley saga. The story follows two families: the Hamiltons – based on
Steinbeck's own maternal ancestry – and the Trasks, reprising stories
about the Biblical Adam and his progeny. The book was published in 1952.
It was made into a movie in 1955 directed by
Elia Kazan starring
James Dean.
Travels with Charley
In 1960, Steinbeck bought a pickup truck and had it modified with a custom-built
camper top – which was rare at the time – and drove across the United States with his faithful 'blue'
standard poodle, Charley. Steinbeck nicknamed his truck
Rocinante after
Don Quixote's "noble steed". In this sometimes comical, sometimes melancholic book, Steinbeck describes what he sees from
Maine to
Montana to California, and from there to
Texas and
Louisiana and back to his home on
Long Island. The restored camper truck is on exhibit in the
National Steinbeck Center in Salinas.
Bibliography
Filmography
- 1939—Of Mice and Men—directed by Lewis Milestone, featuring Burgess Meredith, Lon Chaney, Jr., and Betty Field
- 1940—The Grapes of Wrath—directed by John Ford, featuring Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell and John Carradine
- 1941—The Forgotten Village—directed by Alexander Hammid and Herbert Kline, narrated by Burgess Meredith, music by Hanns Eisler
- 1942—Tortilla Flat—directed by Victor Fleming, featuring Spencer Tracy, Hedy Lamarr and John Garfield
- 1943—The Moon is Down—directed by Irving Pichel, featuring Lee J. Cobb and Sir Cedric Hardwicke
- 1944—Lifeboat—directed by Alfred Hitchcock, featuring Tallulah Bankhead, Hume Cronyn, and John Hodiak
- 1944—A Medal for Benny—directed by Irving Pichel, featuring Dorothy Lamour and Arturo de Cordova
- 1947—La Perla (The Pearl, Mexico)—directed by Emilio Fernández, featuring Pedro Armendáriz and María Elena Marqués
- 1949—The Red Pony—directed by Lewis Milestone, featuring Myrna Loy, Robert Mitchum, and Louis Calhern
- 1952—Viva Zapata!—directed by Elia Kazan, featuring Marlon Brando, Anthony Quinn and Jean Peters
- 1955—East of Eden—directed by Elia Kazan, featuring James Dean, Julie Harris, Jo Van Fleet, and Raymond Massey
- 1957—The Wayward Bus—directed by Victor Vicas, featuring Rick Jason, Jayne Mansfield, and Joan Collins
- 1961—Flight—featuring Efrain Ramírez and Arnelia Cortez
- 1962—Ikimize bir dünya (Of Mice and Men, Turkey)
- 1972—Topoli (Of Mice and Men, Iran)
- 1982—Cannery Row—directed by David S. Ward, featuring Nick Nolte and Debra Winger
- 1992—Of Mice and Men—directed by Gary Sinise and starring John Malkovich and Gary Sinise