He worked his way through college at Stanford University but never graduated. In he went to New York, where he tried for a few years to establish himself as a free-lance writer, but he failed and returned to California. After publishing some novels and short stories, Steinbeck first became widely known with Tortilla Flat , a series of humorous stories about Monterey paisanos. After the rough and earthy humour of Tortilla Flat, he moved on to more serious fiction, often aggressive in its social criticism, to In Dubious Battle , which deals with the strikes of the migratory fruit pickers on California plantations.
His mother, Olive Hamilton Steinbeck, was a former schoolteacher. For the most part, Steinbeck—who grew up with three sisters—had a happy childhood. According to accounts, Steinbeck decided to become a writer at the age of 14, often locking himself in his bedroom to write poems and stories. Over the following decade, he poured himself into his writing with Carol's support and paycheck, until the couple divorced in Steinbeck was married to his second wife, Gwyndolyn Conger, from to The couple had two sons together, Thomas born and John born In , Steinbeck wed his third wife, Elaine Anderson Scott.
The couple remained together until his death in We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Subscribe to the Biography newsletter to receive stories about the people who shaped our world and the stories that shaped their lives. Famed singer-songwriter John Lennon founded the Beatles, a band that impacted the popular music scene like no other.
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In March 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. In , Carol and John separated, divorcing in Steinbeck was a patriot, as were many Americans after Pearl Harbor, as the U.
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. 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.
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:. Hell, I thought I was building the war up. Certainly we were thinking more universally. 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.
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, The the two men had shared an intense working relationship as well as a deep personal friendship. The resulting book was to be called The Outer Shores and would have focused on marine life near Alaska. After nearly six years of marriage, Gwyn Steinbeck asked for a divorce. In he returned to the cabin in Pacific Grove and threw himself into his work.
Early in , Steinbeck began again to compose the novel he had planned for years. 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.
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. The novel took nearly a year to complete, and was finally published in
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