John Steinbeck

Chapter 1 · The Long Valley

Salinas, ranch work, and a university he never finished

1902 – 1929 · Salinas · Stanford · New York

John Ernst Steinbeck was born on 27 February 1902 in Salinas, California, a farming town in a fertile valley between two ranges of hills. His father was the county treasurer; his mother, a former teacher, gave him a love of reading and, he said, of the King James Bible and Malory's *Morte d'Arthur*, which he read obsessively as a boy and returned to all his life.

He worked summers on nearby ranches and in sugar-beet fields alongside migrant labourers — Mexican, Filipino and white — which is where he learned the speech and the working conditions he later wrote about. This was ordinary local employment, not research.

He attended Stanford intermittently between 1919 and 1925, taking the courses that interested him — English, marine biology — and leaving without a degree.

He went to New York to become a writer, worked as a construction labourer on Madison Square Garden and briefly as a newspaper reporter, was fired, and came home.

His first novel, a historical romance about the pirate Henry Morgan, was published in 1929 and sank. Two more followed with no success. He lived in a family cottage in Pacific Grove, fished and gardened for food, and was supported by his father, who gave him twenty-five dollars a month.

He married Carol Henning in 1930. She typed his manuscripts, edited them severely, worked to support them both, and later supplied the title *The Grapes of Wrath*.

Why this matters

Steinbeck's knowledge of farm labour came from doing it, which is why his descriptions of work convinced readers who had never seen a field.

You have the young writer. What would you ask him?

Ask Steinbeck

• “What did working the ranches teach you?”
• “Why did you never finish at Stanford?”
• “What did your first three books get wrong?”
• “What did Carol contribute to your work?”
• “Why did Malory matter so much to you?”

Chapter 2 · Ed Ricketts

A marine biologist, a tide pool, and a way of seeing

1930 – 1948 · Monterey · Gulf of California

In 1930 Steinbeck met Ed Ricketts, a marine biologist who ran a small biological supply business on Cannery Row in Monterey, collecting and selling specimens. It became the central intellectual relationship of Steinbeck's life.

Ricketts studied tide pools, where organisms can only be understood in relation to the whole community they belong to. He argued for what he called non-teleological or 'is' thinking: looking at what is actually happening rather than what ought to happen or who is to blame.

Steinbeck applied it to people. His characters are shown as parts of an ecology — economic, geographic, social — rather than as isolated moral agents, which is why his best books resist simple villains. He called the approach, in one formulation, the phalanx: the idea that a group of people can behave as a single organism with its own character.

The two men made a specimen-collecting voyage around the Gulf of California in 1940 and wrote *Sea of Cortez* together, part marine biology and part philosophy.

Ricketts was also personally central. Steinbeck's letters record hours of conversation, music and drinking in the laboratory. He appears as Doc in *Cannery Row*, and versions of him run through several other books.

In 1948 Ricketts's car was hit by a train at a Monterey crossing and he died three days later. Steinbeck wrote that the greatest part of his own life had gone.

His first real success came in 1935 with *Tortilla Flat*, followed by *In Dubious Battle* (1936), a novel about an agricultural strike organised by communists that refuses to romanticise either side.

Why this matters

Ricketts's ecological thinking is the intellectual engine of Steinbeck's fiction: people understood as parts of a system rather than as individuals who succeed or fail on merit.

You have the friendship that shaped the work. What would you ask him?

Ask Steinbeck

• “What did Ricketts mean by looking at what is?”
• “How does tide-pool ecology apply to people?”
• “Why does In Dubious Battle refuse to take sides?”
• “What did losing Ricketts do to your writing?”
• “What is the phalanx idea?”

Chapter 3 · The Grapes of Wrath

A book burned in the county it described

1936 – 1940 · California · Oklahoma

In 1936 the *San Francisco News* sent Steinbeck to report on migrant labour camps. Drought and dust storms across the southern plains, combined with mechanisation and the collapse of tenant farming, had driven hundreds of thousands of families west, where growers advertised far more jobs than existed in order to drive wages down.

He travelled with Tom Collins, manager of a federal camp, and saw children dying of malnutrition in a state producing enormous food surpluses. The resulting articles, 'The Harvest Gypsies', were furious. *Of Mice and Men* (1937), about two ranch hands with a plan they will never achieve, came from the same world.

*The Grapes of Wrath* (1939) follows the Joad family from a foreclosed Oklahoma farm to California. Its narrative chapters alternate with short intercalary chapters that widen out to the whole migration — a used-car salesman's patter, the mechanics of a tractor foreclosure, a turtle crossing a road.

The title, from the Battle Hymn of the Republic, was Carol's suggestion, and Steinbeck asked that the hymn be printed in the book so nobody could call it un-American.

It did not work. The Associated Farmers of California called it communist propaganda. It was banned from schools and libraries in several counties, and publicly burned in Kern County, the area it described. Steinbeck received death threats, and the FBI opened a file on him.

It sold enormously, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940, and contributed to congressional hearings on migrant labour conditions.

One criticism is fair and worth stating: Steinbeck wrote about the white migrants and gave little attention to the Mexican and Filipino labourers who had worked those fields for decades, often under worse conditions.

“In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy for the vintage.”

— John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, chapter 25, 1939

Why this matters

The Grapes of Wrath changed public understanding of Depression migration and prompted congressional investigation, while the campaign against it is a documented case of a novel being burned in the community it described.

You have the book that made him hated at home. What would you ask him?

Ask Steinbeck

• “What did you see in the camps in 1936?”
• “Why did growers advertise more jobs than existed?”
• “Why alternate the Joads with wider chapters?”
• “How did it feel to have the book burned in Kern County?”
• “Why did you write so little about Mexican farmworkers?”

Chapter 4 · East of Eden

The book he thought everything else had been practice for

1941 – 1955 · New York · Salinas Valley · Europe

Steinbeck's war work took him to Europe as a correspondent, and produced *The Moon Is Down* (1942), a short novel about a peaceful country under occupation that was banned by the Nazis, copied and circulated illegally across occupied Europe, and reportedly carried a death sentence for possession in some places. Steinbeck said afterwards that he valued that more than most of his reviews.

His marriage to Carol had ended in 1943; he married Gwyn Conger, had two sons, and divorced again in 1948 — the same year Ricketts died. It was the lowest period of his life.

*Cannery Row* (1945) is a warm, apparently plotless book about Monterey's marginal people, written, he said, as a relief from the war.

*East of Eden* (1952) is what he called his big book — the one everything else had been practice for. It retells Cain and Abel across two generations of two California families, one of them his own mother's, with Steinbeck himself appearing as a child.

Its centre is a discussion of a Hebrew word in Genesis. God tells Cain that he shall, or must, rule over sin — but the character Lee, a Chinese-American servant who is the book's moral intelligence, reports that scholars have found the word is *timshel*, meaning thou mayest. Not a promise and not an order, but a choice. Steinbeck said that if there was one idea he wanted to leave behind, it was that.

Critics were unenthusiastic; readers were not, and it has outlasted much of the criticism.

Why this matters

The timshel argument in East of Eden — that human beings are given the possibility of choice rather than a guarantee or a command — is the clearest statement of Steinbeck's moral position.

You have the book he cared most about. What would you ask him?

Ask Steinbeck

• “What does timshel mean, and why does it matter?”
• “Why call East of Eden your big book?”
• “What happened to The Moon Is Down in occupied Europe?”
• “How did you get through 1948?”
• “Why write yourself into the novel?”

Chapter 5 · Stockholm and Saigon

A contested prize and an unpopular war

1960 – 1968 and after · Stockholm · Vietnam · New York

*Travels with Charley* (1962), an account of driving around America with a poodle, was a bestseller and is now known to be substantially reconstructed: journalists retracing the route found the timings impossible and several conversations improbable. Steinbeck's own text describes it as a search rather than a record, but readers took it as reportage.

He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, and the reaction was hostile. The *New York Times* asked why the prize had gone to a writer whose best work was more than twenty years behind him. Swedish critics objected. Steinbeck, asked at a press conference whether he deserved it, said frankly that he did not. When the Nobel archives for that year were opened in 2012, they showed the committee had regarded him as the best of a bad list — a compromise choice.

His acceptance speech is better than the coverage. He said that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

His final years damaged his standing among younger writers. He supported American involvement in Vietnam, partly out of friendship with President Johnson and partly because both his sons served. He went to Vietnam in 1966 and 1967 as a correspondent, wrote columns broadly supportive of the troops and the war, and posed with weapons. He appears to have moved toward doubt in his last months, but he never publicly recanted.

He died of heart disease on 20 December 1968, aged sixty-six.

*Of Mice and Men* and *The Grapes of Wrath* remain among the most taught novels in the English-speaking world, and both are also among the most frequently challenged in American schools.

Why this matters

Steinbeck's contested Nobel Prize and his support for the Vietnam War are a reminder that a writer's political judgement and literary achievement do not have to move together.

You have the contested prize and the unpopular war. What would you ask him?

Ask Steinbeck

• “Did you deserve the Nobel Prize?”
• “How much of Travels with Charley actually happened?”
• “Why did you support the war in Vietnam?”
• “How does supporting that war fit with The Grapes of Wrath?”
• “Why are your books still banned in American schools?”

What Steinbeck changed

The Grapes of Wrath changed American public understanding of Depression-era migration and contributed to congressional action on farm labour conditions. Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath remain among the most widely taught novels in English, and Steinbeck's ecological view of human communities influenced later American nature and social writing.

A debate that continues

His 1962 Nobel Prize was questioned at the time and confirmed as a compromise choice when the archives opened, and critics argue over his neglect of non-white farmworkers and his support for the Vietnam War.

Keep exploring — ask Steinbeck

• “How do you write about poverty without turning people into symbols?”
• “What did Ed Ricketts teach you that changed your books?”
• “Which of your novels do you think will last?”

Related lives

• Mark Twain — The Great American Humorist
• Rachel Carson — Author of Silent Spring
• Arthur Miller — Conscience of the American Stage

Related themes

The Great Depression · Migration and labour · American realist fiction