John Steinbeck, born in Salinas, California, in 1902, grew
up in a fertile agricultural valley, about twenty-five miles from
the Pacific Coast. Both the valley and the coast would serve as
settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford
University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and
writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree.
During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and
journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first
novel, Cup of Gold (1929).
After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two
California books, The Pastures of Heaven (1932)
and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories
later collected in The Long Valley (1938). Popular
success and financial security came only with Tortilla
Flat (1935), stories about Monterey’s paisanos. A ceaseless
experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses
regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the
California laboring class: In Dubious
Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the book
considered by many his finest, The Grapes of
Wrath (1939). The Grapes of Wrath won both the
National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1939.
Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with The
Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious student of marine
biology with Sea of Cortez (1941). He devoted his
services to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the
controversial play-novelette The Moon is
Down (1942).Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward
Bus (1948), another experimental drama, Burning
Bright(1950), and The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951)
preceded publication of the monumental East of
Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his
own family’s history.
The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag
Harbor with his third wife, with whom he traveled widely. Later
books include Sweet Thursday (1954), The Short Reign
of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957), Once There Was a
War (1958), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961),Travels
with Charley in Search of America (1962), America and
Americans (1966), and the posthumously published Journal
of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969), Viva
Zapata!(1975), The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble
Knights (1976), and Working Days: The Journals of The
Grapes of Wrath (1989).
Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, and, in
1964, he was presented with the United States Medal of Freedom by
President Lyndon B. Johnson. Steinbeck died in New York in 1968.
Today, more than thirty years after his death, he remains one of
America's greatest writers and cultural figures.
Linda Wagner-Martin is Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English
at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the editor
of The Portable Edith Wharton.
“[The Pearl] has the distinction and sincerity that are evident in
everything he writes.”—The New Yorker
“Form is the most important thing about him. It is at its best in
this work.” —Commonweal
“[Steinbeck has] long trained his prose style for such a task as
this: that supple unstrained, muscular power, responsive to the
slightest pull of the reins.”—Chicago Sunday Times
"[The Pearl] has the distinction and sincerity that are evident in everything he writes." The New Yorker"Form is the most important thing about him. It is at its best in this work." Commonweal "[Steinbeck has] long trained his prose style for such a task as this: that supple unstrained, muscular power, responsive to the slightest pull of the reins." Chicago Sunday Times
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