John Steinbeck

Salinas gave him the valley and the work in it. He spent summers on ranches around Monterey County and later labored on the Spreckels sugar beet farms alongside migrant crews, where he learned what that life actually cost. His father was the county treasurer, his mother a schoolteacher. He went to Stanford to study English and left in 1925 without a degree. New York did not take: he worked odd jobs, could not place anything, and came home. His parents gave him free housing at Pacific Grove, paper for his manuscripts, and small loans so he did not have to look for work. He and his first wife, Carol Henning, lived partly on fish he caught and, on rare occasions, bacon stolen from the produce market.

Tortilla Flat, in 1935, was the first book anyone noticed. Then the California novels came in a rush — In Dubious Battle in 1936, Of Mice and Men in 1937, and The Grapes of Wrath in 1939, which he wrote after the San Francisco News sent him into the Hooverville camps of the San Joaquin Valley. It was the best-selling book of 1939, won the National Book Award and then the Pulitzer, and John Ford filmed it inside a year. Ed Ricketts, the Monterey marine biologist, supplied the ecology underneath all of it and became Doc in Cannery Row. Steinbeck reported the war for the New York Herald Tribune in 1943, wrote East of Eden in 1952, drove the country with a poodle for Travels with Charley in 1962, and took the Nobel Prize the same year.

The Grapes of Wrath got him threatened. He bought a handgun. Kern County banned the book from its schools and libraries in August 1939, a ban that held until January 1941, and copies were burned in Salinas twice. He wrote in 1942 to Attorney General Francis Biddle asking whether Edgar's boys could stop stepping on his heels — the FBI said he was not under investigation. Then in 1967 Newsday sent him to Vietnam, where he supported the war, visited his son at a firebase, and spent a night manning a machine-gun position while the platoon slept. The New York Post accused him of betraying his leftist past. He attacked the anti-war young in print as a fallout, drop-out, cop-out insurgency.

He died in New York on December 20, 1968, of heart disease. He had smoked all his life, and the autopsy found his coronary arteries nearly closed. He was cremated and buried in the Hamilton family plot at Salinas on March 4, 1969. The Nobel had been contested from the day it was announced — one Swedish paper called it a mistake of the Academy, the New York Times asked why the laurel had not gone elsewhere, and Steinbeck, asked whether he deserved it, said: Frankly, no. In 2012 the prize archives opened and showed he had been a compromise on a weak shortlist. The American Library Association counted him among the ten most banned authors between 1990 and 2004.

John Steinbeck's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Tortilla Flat book
  His first success — it won the Commonwealth Club gold medal 1935
• Of Mice and Men book
  Written to be read and staged at once 1937
• The Grapes of Wrath book
  Best-selling book of 1939, then the National Book Award and the Pulitzer 1939
• Sea of Cortez book
  Written with Ed Ricketts. It never found an audience. 1941
• East of Eden book
  The Salinas Valley novel, built on his mother's family 1952
• Travels with Charley book
  A cross-country drive in a camper truck named Rocinante 1962

• 1919 aged ~17 Graduates from Salinas High School
• 1925 aged ~23 Leaves Stanford without a degree and fails to place anything in New York
• 1930 aged ~28 Marries Carol Henning and meets the biologist Ed Ricketts Ricketts taught him the ecology that runs under the California novels.
• August 1936 aged 34 The San Francisco News sends him into the San Joaquin Valley camps
• August 1939 aged 37 Kern County bans The Grapes of Wrath from its schools and libraries The ban held until January 1941. Steinbeck had already bought a handgun.
• 1940 aged ~38 Wins the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
• May 1948 aged 46 Ed Ricketts dies hours before Steinbeck can reach him A train had struck his car. Steinbeck spent the following year in deep depression.
• 1962 aged ~60 Wins the Nobel Prize in Literature to loud objections
• 1967 aged ~65 Goes to Vietnam for Newsday and comes back a hawk

• Dorothea Lange 1895–1965
  Documentary photographer whose Depression-era images defined the visual record of the 1930s. photographed the same migration
• Woody Guthrie 1912–1967
  Dust Bowl balladeer whose songs shaped American folk and protest music for later generations. set the same migration to music
• César Chávez 1927–1993
  Labor leader and civil rights activist who co-founded the United Farm Workers union. organized the workers he wrote about
• Eleanor Roosevelt 1884–1962
  First Lady and human rights advocate who chaired the UN committee that drafted the Universal Declaration. defended the book in print
• John Ford 1894–1973
  Director of Westerns and Depression dramas who won four directing Academy Awards. filmed The Grapes of Wrath
• Arthur Miller 1915–2005
  Playwright whose Death of a Salesman and The Crucible are cornerstones of American drama. supported at the HUAC hearings