John Steinbeck

Born on 27 February 1902 in Salinas, California, in the long agricultural valley that would become the landscape of nearly all his major fiction, John Ernst Steinbeck was the son of a county treasurer and a former schoolteacher. He attended Stanford University intermittently between 1919 and 1925 but never graduated, preferring to work as a ranch hand, fruit picker, and manual laborer , experiences that gave him an intimacy with working-class life that few American novelists could match. His early novels attracted little attention, but Tortilla Flat (1935), a comic chronicle of Monterey’s paisanos, became a bestseller and established his reputation. In Dubious Battle (1936) portrayed a migrant workers’ strike with documentary intensity. Of Mice and Men (1937) , the story of George and Lennie, two displaced ranch workers chasing an impossible dream , became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and a Broadway hit. Then came The Grapes of Wrath (1939), his masterpiece, tracking the Joad family’s exodus from Dust Bowl Oklahoma to the hostile orchards of California. It won the Pulitzer Prize, sold 430,000 copies in its first year, was banned and publicly burned in several counties, and prompted the Associated Farmers of California to denounce Steinbeck as a dangerous radical. He served as a war correspondent during World War II and traveled to the Soviet Union with photographer Robert Capa. East of Eden (1952), his most ambitious novel, retold the Cain and Abel story across generations in the Salinas Valley. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, though critics had long considered his best work behind him. He died in New York City on 20 December 1968.

Between June and October of 1938, Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath in roughly a hundred working days, keeping a journal each morning before he began. Its pages record a man convinced he was failing: 'I'm not a writer. I've been fooling myself and other people.' The book won the Pulitzer.