John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck (born February 27, 1902, Salinas, California, U.S.—died December 20, 1968, Manhattan, New York) was an American novelist best known for The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which summed up the bitterness of the Great Depression and aroused widespread sympathy for the plight of migratory farmworkers. His other works include the novella Of Mice and Men (1937) and the sweeping historical novel East of Eden (1952). 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.”

California’s native son

Steinbeck spent much of his life in central California’s Monterey county, which later was the setting of some of his fiction. He was the only son of John Ernst Steinbeck, a flour mill manager, and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck, a teacher. The closing of the mill in 1910 forced Steinbeck’s father to pursue other ventures, including opening a feed and grain store that failed. Later he was appointed county treasurer.

The Steinbeck family, which was of German and Irish heritage, lived in Salinas but had a summer cottage in Pacific Grove, near Monterey. As a boy Steinbeck also spent many summers at his maternal grandparents’ ranch near King City in the Salinas Valley. The area’s ecology and natural beauty, including the Pacific Ocean and the fertile fields of the valley, deeply interested the restless young Steinbeck. An early lover of books and stories, he read the adventure-filled novels of Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter Scott, Mark Twain, and Jack London, along with such works as the Bible and Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur.

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Education and life as a laborer

Steinbeck attended local public schools, followed by Stanford University in California between 1919 and 1925. He had a lackadaisical approach to his education, enrolling only in the courses that interested him and attending class intermittently. In the summers he worked as a surveyor in the Big Sur region and as a carpenter’s helper and jack-of-all-trades at a sugar mill. In 1925 Steinbeck left college without completing a degree and spent the summer at Lake Tahoe, where he worked as the caretaker of a lodge. He then traveled to New York City on a freighter that took him through the Panama Canal.

Indeed, before his books attained success, Steinbeck spent considerable time supporting himself as a manual laborer while writing, and his experiences lent authenticity to his depictions of the lives of the workers in his stories. In New York he joined the construction crew of Madison Square Garden and became a reporter for the New York American; Steinbeck’s journalism career was cut short after the aspiring novelist kept mingling fiction with facts. The following summer he returned to California.

Of Mice and Men and other early works

Steinbeck’s first novel, Cup of Gold (1929), was an allegorical pirate story about Welsh buccaneer Henry Morgan, flavored with elements of Arthurian legend. It sold a paltry 1,500 copies. It was followed by The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), neither of which were successful. About this time, however, Steinbeck befriended Edward F. Ricketts, a marine biologist who strongly influenced Steinbeck’s views on humans’ relationship to the environment. Both men subscribed to non-teleological thinking, a viewpoint in which one examines and accepts life as it is rather than looking for the “why” or “what may be” in events. Steinbeck characterized it as “is” thinking. The philosophy pervades much of his later fiction. Ricketts also introduced the writer to the myth scholar Joseph Campbell, whose budding friendship with Steinbeck promptly ended after Campbell fell in love with the novelist’s wife, Carol Henning. (The Steinbecks remained married for the time being.)

Steinbeck at last achieved popularity as a writer with Tortilla Flat (1935), an affectionately told story of a group of pleasure-loving Mexican Americans in the Monterey area. The mood of gentle humor turned to one of unrelenting grimness in Steinbeck’s next novel, In Dubious Battle (1936), a classic account of a strike by agricultural laborers and the pair of Marxist labor organizers who engineer it. Next came Of Mice and Men (1937), a tragic story about the strange, complex bond between two migrant laborers. The book was adapted into a three-act play by Steinbeck (produced in 1937) and later appeared in film and television versions. That year he also published The Red Pony, a book of three interrelated stories about a young boy’s coming of age; a fourth story was added in 1945.

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The Grapes of Wrath

For his next work, Steinbeck visited migrant labor camps and tent cities in California to gather research for what became The Grapes of Wrath. The novel, which centers on the migration of the dispossessed Joads from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to California, describes their subsequent exploitation by a ruthless system of agricultural economics. Accessible and colloquial in writing style and fierce in its denunciation of capitalism, the book garnered both praise and condemnation. Among its admirers was first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who recommended it in her nationally syndicated newspaper column, “My Day”:

Now I must tell you that I have just finished a book which is an unforgetable experience in reading. “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck, both repels and attracts you. The horrors of the picture, so well drawn, make you dread sometimes to begin the next chapter, and yet you cannot lay the book down or even skip a page.

The following year Roosevelt visited laborer camps and assured the media that Steinbeck had not exaggerated the dire conditions there. Steinbeck sent her a letter of gratitude: “I have been called a liar so constantly that sometimes I wonder whether I may not have dreamed the things I saw and heard in the period of my research.”

Not only was he called a liar, but Steinbeck was also deemed a communist by many business and government officials. (He in fact deplored communism.) Some communities, including Kern county, California, where the Joad family settles, branded the book libelous and even burned copies of it and banned it from libraries and schools.

Yet The Grapes of Wrath won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, inspired a folk song by Woody Guthrie, and was made into a notable film (1940) by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad.

Later novels and screenplays

After the best-selling success of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck went to Mexico to collect marine life with Ricketts, and the two men collaborated in writing Sea of Cortez (1941), a study of the fauna of the Gulf of California. Steinbeck’s frequent field trips strained his relationship with his wife, and in 1942 he and Henning divorced. One year later he wed Gwyn Conger, with whom he had two sons, John and Thom. They divorced in 1948, and Steinbeck married Elaine Scott in 1950.

During World War II Steinbeck wrote some effective pieces of government propaganda, among them The Moon Is Down (1942), a novel of Norwegians living under the Nazis, and he also served as a war correspondent. His immediate postwar works—Cannery Row (1945), The Pearl (1947), and The Wayward Bus (1947)—contained the familiar elements of his social criticism but were more relaxed in approach and sentimental in tone.

Steinbeck’s later writings—which include Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962), about Steinbeck’s experiences as he drove across the United States with his pet French Poodle—were interspersed with three conscientious attempts to reassert his stature as a major novelist: Burning Bright (1950), East of Eden (1952), and The Winter of Our Discontent (1961). In critical opinion, none equaled his earlier achievement. East of Eden, an ambitious epic about the moral relations between a California farmer and his two sons, also offered a history of Salinas Valley and of the Hamilton side of Steinbeck’s ancestry. Steinbeck considered it his magnum opus and put all his creative powers into it. Shortly after it was published, he told the Saturday Review:

I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this. I’m fifty years old. If East of Eden isn’t good, then I’ve been wasting my time. It has in it everything I have been able to learn about my art or craft or profession in all these years. Do you know, I want terribly for people to read it and to like it. I’ll be miserable if they don’t.

Despite its critical failure, it was a bestseller and was made into a film by Elia Kazan in 1955. A Netflix series based on the novel premiered in 2026. Steinbeck himself wrote the scripts for the film versions of his stories The Pearl (1948) and The Red Pony (1949), the latter of which featured a memorable score by composer Aaron Copland. Outstanding among the scripts he wrote directly for motion pictures were the documentary The Forgotten Village (1941) and Viva Zapata! (1952), a biopic of the Mexican revolutionary.

Legacy

Steinbeck died of severe coronary and valvular heart disease in 1968. He was 66.

Steinbeck’s reputation rests mostly on the naturalistic novels with proletarian themes he wrote in the 1930s; it is in these works that his building of rich symbolic structures and his attempts at conveying mythopoeic and archetypal qualities in his characters are most effective. Even with these novels and certainly with his later works, Steinbeck was often dismissed by critics as a purveyor of populist fiction. The East Coast literary establishment considered his writing to be rambling, vulgar, didactic, and moralistic.

Many readers, however, welcomed the compassion and honesty in his novels and stories, which unfailingly championed ordinary people and the working classes. The Grapes of Wrath in particular struck a nerve. It became not only a classic work of American literature but also the defining literary interpretation of the Great Depression. While awarding him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, the Swedish Academy acknowledged Steinbeck’s deep feeling for the dispossessed:

His sympathies always go out to the oppressed, to the misfits and the distressed….Dear Mr. Steinbeck—you are not a stranger to the Swedish public any more than to that of your own country and of the whole world. With your most distinctive works you have become a teacher of good will and charity, a defender of human values.