Steinbeck, John (Ernst)

Steinbeck, John [Ernst] (1902–68),California novelist, attended Stanford University (1919–20, 1922–23, 1924–25), and worked at odd jobs, beginning his literary career with Cup of Gold (1929), a romantic novel based on the career of Sir Henry Morgan, the buccaneer. This was followed by The Pastures of Heaven (1932), a collection of short stories portraying the people of a farm community in a California valley. His second novel, To a God Unknown (1933), tells of a California farmer whose pagan religion of fertility becomes a mystical obsession, and after a season of drought leads to his suicide as a sacrifice on the sylvan altar at which he has worshiped.

Tortilla Flat (1935) won Steinbeck popular attention for the first time, with its sympathetically humorous depiction of the lives of Monterey paisanos. In Dubious Battle (1936), the story of a strike of migratory fruit pickers, was the first of his novels concerned with the conditions of this class, which continued to hold his interest. In Of Mice and Men (1937), the story of two itinerant farmhands represents the tragedy of a class that yearns for a home, of which it is perpetually deprived. After dramatizing this work with great success (1937), Steinbeck published a volume of short stories, The Long Valley (1938), containing the previously published Saint Katy the Virgin (1936) and The Red Pony (1937), published separately with additional material in 1945. His concern with the problems of the landless farm laborer received greatest emphasis in The Grapes of Wrath (1939, Pulitzer Prize), a saga of a refugee family from the Dust Bowl, its migration to California, and the struggle to find work under an almost feudal system of agricultural exploitation.

In the 1940s Steinbeck wrote very various works. They include The Forgotten Village (1941), the script of a film depicting Mexican village life; Sea of Cortez (1941), written with his friend Edward F. Ricketts, a marine biologist, presenting a journal of their travels and marine research in the Gulf of California and containing Steinbeck's reflections on life; and The Pearl (1948), a short parable about a Mexican fisherman who finds a great pearl that brings evil to his family. This decade was also one of war writings: Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team (1942); his dispatches of 1943 gathered in Once There Was a War (1958); and A Russian Journal (1948). Out of the same background came The Moon Is Down (1942), a novelette he dramatized (1942), about Norwegian resistance to the German occupation.

He returned to the setting and mood of Tortilla Flat in Cannery Row (1945), a whimsical tale of idlers in Monterey and their relations with a sympathetic biologist. These people and this place appear again in Sweet Thursday (1954). The Wayward Bus (1947) is a novel presenting a microcosm of frustrations in contemporary America through the stresses on a group of people stranded on a bus in rural California. Burning Bright (1950) in novelette form is a symbolic morality play about a man whose sterility forces him to accept another's child as his own. East of Eden (1952), his first major novel after The Grapes of Wrath, is a long family saga from the Civil War to World War I, partly set in the Salinas Valley, using the theme of Cain and Abel in a story both symbolic and realistic of man's struggle between good and evil. After a brief and minor novel, The Short Reign of Pippin IV (1957), a lighthearted comedy about a 20th‐century French king, Steinbeck returned to full‐bodied and serious fiction with The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), treating the moral collapse of a descendant of an old New England family, a man of high integrity, under the pressures of the mid‐20th century.

Steinbeck's fiction combines realism and romance, but not always harmoniously. His settings are often rural areas, where people live most happily when close to nature, but where malevolent forces, such as drought or labor and market conditions or human greed, destroy this vital relationship. In dealing with the consequent problems Steinbeck's approach is sometimes lyric and mystical, sometimes realistic and sociological. Although he suffered a long period of adverse criticism, particularly in the United States, he remained popular and esteemed in Europe, and in the year when he published his account of a tour of 40 states, accompanied by his poodle, as Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), he became the seventh American‐born author to win a Nobel Prize.

His posthumously published works include The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976), a retelling of the tales. Correspondence appears in Journals of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969), Steinbeck: A Life in Letters (1975), and Letters to Elizabeth (1978).