John Steinbeck, born on February 27, 1902 in Salinas, California, to John Ernst and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck attended Stanford University between 1920 and 1926, but never graduated from Stanford, but instead chose to support himself through manual labor while writing. Steinbeck moved to New York City where he began working for a newspaper, but getting too emotionally involved in the stories he was writing, he turned back to California by working as a deckhand on a ship. There, he devoted himself to writing and producing an adventure story about a Caribbean pirate, Cup of Gold published in 1929. Steinbeck married Carol Henning the following year and settled in Pacific Grove, California. However, after writing numerous successful novels, including his best-selling piece The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, he divorces Carol and marries Gwyndolen Conger and had two sons. But again, he divorces his wife and marries Elaine Scott in 1950.
It was his experiences among the working classes in California gave Steinbeck ideas for writing about workers in many of his most important novels. Steinbeck has spent much of his life in Monterey Country, which later was the setting of some of his fiction. Many of his novels became a success, but Steinbeck’s reputation depends mostly on the naturalistic novels with proletarian themes he wrote during the Depression. It is in these works that Steinbeck is most effective in his building of rich symbolic structures and his attempts at conveying the archetypal qualities of his characters.
Academic Writing
Of Mice and Men
John Steinbeck, born on February 27, 1902 in Salinas, California, to John Ernst and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck attended Stanford University between 1920 and 1926, but never graduated from Stanford, but instead chose to support himself through manual labor while writing. Steinbeck moved to New York City where he began working for a newspaper, but getting too emotionally involved in the stories he was writing, he turned back to California by working as a deckhand on ...