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John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. (February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) was an American writer. He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), East of Eden (1952) and the novella Of Mice and Men (1937). As the author of twenty-seven books, including sixteen novels, six non-fiction books, and five collections of short stories, Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.
John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California. He was of German, English, and Irish descent. Johann Adolf Großsteinbeck, Steinbeck's paternal grandfather, had shortened the family name to Steinbeck when he emigrated to the United States. The family farm in Heiligenhaus, Mettmann, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, is still today named "Großsteinbeck."
His father, John Ernst Steinbeck, served as Monterey County treasurer. John's mother, Olive Hamilton, a former school teacher, shared Steinbeck's passion of reading and writing. The Steinbecks were members of the Episcopal Church, although Steinbeck would later become an agnostic. Steinbeck lived in a small rural town, no more than a frontier settlement, set in some of the world's most fertile land. He spent his summers working on nearby ranches and later with migrant workers on Spreckels ranch. There he became aware of the harsher aspects of migrant life and the darker side of human nature, which supplied him with material expressed in such works as Of Mice and Men. He also explored his surroundings, walking across local forests, fields, and farms.
Steinbeck graduated from Salinas High School in 1919 and went from there to Stanford University in Palo Alto where he stayed for five years until 1925, leaving without a degree. He traveled to New York City where he took odd jobs while trying to write. When he failed to have his work published, he returned to California and worked in 1928 as a tour guide and caretaker at the fish hatchery in Tahoe City, where he met Carol Henning, his first wife. The two were married in January 1930, and for most of the Great Depression and during his marriage to Carol, Steinbeck lived in a cottage owned by his father in Pacific Grove, California, on the Monterey Peninsula a few blocks from the border of the city of Monterey, California. The elder Steinbecks gave him free housing, paper for his manuscripts, and from 1928, loans that allowed him to give up a warehouse job in San Francisco to focus on writing.
Steinbeck's first novel, Cup of Gold, published in 1929, is based on the life and death of privateer Henry Morgan. It centers on Morgan's assault and sacking of the city of Panama, sometimes referred to as the 'Cup of Gold', and on the woman, fairer than the sun, who was said to be found there.
After Cup of Gold, between 1931 and 1933 Steinbeck produced three shorter works. The Pastures of Heaven, published in 1932, comprised twelve interconnected stories about a valley near Monterey, which was discovered by a Spanish corporal while chasing runaway Indian slaves. In 1933 Steinbeck published The Red Pony, a 100-page, four-chapter story weaving in memories of Steinbeck's childhood. To a God Unknown follows the life of a homesteader and his family in California, depicting a character with a primal and pagan worship of the land he works.
Steinbeck achieved his first critical success with Tortilla Flat (1935), a novel set in post-war Monterey, California, that won the California Commonwealth Club's Gold Medal. It portrays the adventures of a group of classless and usually homeless young men in Monterey after World War I, just before U.S. prohibition. They are portrayed in ironic comparison to mythic knights on a quest and reject nearly all the standard mores of American society in enjoyment of a dissolute life centered around wine, lust, camaraderie and petty theft. In presenting the 1962 Nobel Prize to Steinbeck, the Swedish Academy cited "spicy and comic tales about a gang of paisanos, asocial individuals who, in their wild revels, are almost caricatures of King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table. It has been said that in the United States this book came as a welcome antidote to the gloom of the then prevailing depression." Tortilla Flat was adapted as a 1942 film of the same name, starring Spencer Tracy, Hedy Lamarr and John Garfield, a friend of Steinbeck's. With some of the proceeds he built a summer ranch-home in Los Gatos.
In 1940, Steinbeck went on a voyage around the Gulf of California with his friend Ed Ricketts, to collect biological specimens, described in The Log from the Sea of Cortez. Although Carol accompanied Steinbeck on the trip, their marriage was beginning to suffer, and ended a year later, in 1941, even as Steinbeck worked on the manuscript for the book. In 1942, after his divorce from Carol he married Gwyndolyn "Gwyn" Conger. With his second wife Steinbeck had two sons—Thomas ("Thom" Myles Steinbeck (born 1944) and John Steinbeck IV (1946–1991).
Steinbeck began to write a series of "California novels" and Dust Bowl fiction, set among common people during the Great Depression. These included In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath.
Of Mice and Men was a drama about the dreams of a pair of migrant agricultural laborers in California. It was critically acclaimed and Steinbeck's 1962 Nobel Prize citation called it a "little masterpiece". Its stage production was a hit, starring Broderick Crawford as the mentally childlike but physically powerful itinerant farmhand Lennie, and Wallace Ford as Lennie's companion George. However, Steinbeck refused to travel from his home in California to attend any performance of the play during its New York run, telling director George S. Kaufman that the play as it existed in his own mind was "perfect" and that anything presented on stage would only be a disappointment. Steinbeck would write two more stage plays (The Moon Is Down and Burning Bright).
Of Mice and Men was also adapted as a 1939 Hollywood film, with Lon Chaney, Jr. as Lennie (he had filled the role in the Los Angeles stage production) and Burgess Meredith as George.
Steinbeck followed this wave of success with The Grapes of Wrath (1939), based on newspaper articles about migrant agricultural workers that he had written in San Francisco. It is commonly considered his greatest work. According to The New York Times, it was the best-selling book of 1939 and 430,000 copies had been printed by February 1940. In that month it won the National Book Award, favorite fiction book of 1939, voted by members of the American Booksellers Association. Later that year it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and it was adapted as a film directed by John Ford, starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad; Fonda was nominated for the best actor Academy Award.
Grapes was controversial. Steinbeck's New Deal political views, negative portrayal of aspects of capitalism, and sympathy for the plight of workers, led to a backlash against the author, especially close to home. Claiming the book was both obscene and misrepresented conditions in the county, the Kern County Board of Supervisors banned the book from the county's publicly funded schools and libraries in August 1939. This ban lasted until January 1941.
Of the controversy, Steinbeck wrote, "The vilification of me out here from the large landowners and bankers is pretty bad. The latest is a rumor started by them that the Okies hate me and have threatened to kill me for lying about them. I'm frightened at the rolling might of this damned thing. It is completely out of hand; I mean a kind of hysteria about the book is growing that is not healthy."
The film versions of The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men (by two different movie studios) were in production simultaneously, allowing Steinbeck to spend a full day on the set of The Grapes of Wrath and the next day on the set of Of Mice and Men.
In 1962, Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for literature for his "realistic and imaginative writing, combining as it does sympathetic humor and keen social perception." The selection was heavily criticized, and described as "one of the Academy's biggest mistakes" in one Swedish newspaper. The reaction of American literary critics was also harsh. The New York Times asked why the Nobel committee gave the award to an author whose "limited talent is, in his best books, watered down by tenth-rate philosophising", noting that "The international character of the award and the weight attached to it raise questions about the mechanics of selection and how close the Nobel committee is to the main currents of American writing....We think it interesting that the laurel was not awarded to a writer ... whose significance, influence and sheer body of work had already made a more profound impression on the literature of our age". Steinbeck himself, when asked on the day of the announcement if he deserved the Nobel, replied: "Frankly, no." Biographer Jackson Benson notes, "This honor was one of the few in the world that one could not buy nor gain by political maneuver.
In May 1948, Steinbeck went back to California on an emergency trip to be with his friend Ed Ricketts, who had been seriously injured when his car was struck by a train. Ricketts died hours before Steinbeck arrived. Upon returning home, Steinbeck was confronted by Gwyn, who asked for a divorce, which became final in August. Steinbeck spent the year after Ricketts' death in deep depression.
In June 1949, Steinbeck met stage-manager Elaine Scott at a restaurant in Carmel, California. Steinbeck and Scott eventually began a relationship and in December 1950 Steinbeck and Scott married, within a week of the finalizing of Scott's own divorce from actor Zachary Scott. This third (and final) marriage for Steinbeck lasted until his death in 1968.
In 1966, Steinbeck traveled to Tel Aviv to visit the site of Mount Hope, a farm community established in Israel by his grandfather, whose brother, Friedrich Grosssteinbeck, was murdered by Arab marauders in 1858 in what became known as the Outrages at Jaffa.
John Steinbeck died in New York City on December 20, 1968, of heart disease and congestive heart failure. He was 66, and had been a lifelong smoker. An autopsy showed nearly complete occlusion of the main coronary arteries.
In accordance with his wishes, his body was cremated, and interred (March 4, 1969) at the Hamilton family gravesite in Salinas, with those of his parents and maternal grandparents. His third wife, Elaine, was buried in the plot in 2004. He had earlier written to his doctor that he felt deeply "in his flesh" that he would not survive his physical death, and that the biological end of his life was the final end to it.
The day after Steinbeck's death in New York City, reviewer Charles Poore wrote in the New York Times: "John Steinbeck's first great book was his last great book. But Good Lord, what a book that was and is: The Grapes of Wrath." Poore noted a "preachiness" in Steinbeck's work, "as if half his literary inheritance came from the best of Mark Twain— and the other half from the worst of Cotton Mather." But he asserted that "Steinbeck didn't need the Nobel Prize— the Nobel judges needed him."
Steinbeck's incomplete novel based on the King Arthur legends of Malory and others, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, was published in 1976.
Many of Steinbeck's works are on required reading lists in American high schools. In the United Kingdom, Of Mice and Men is one of the key texts used by the examining body AQA for its English Literature GCSE. A study by the Center for the Learning and Teaching of Literature in the United States found that Of Mice and Men was one of the ten most frequently read books in public high schools.
At the same time, The Grapes of Wrath has been banned by school boards: in August 1939, Kern County Board of Supervisors banned the book from the county's publicly funded schools and libraries. It was burned in Salinas on two different occasions. In 2003, a school board in Mississippi banned it on the grounds of profanity. According to the American Library Association Steinbeck was one of the ten most frequently banned authors from 1990 to 2004, with Of Mice and Men ranking sixth out of 100 such books in the United States.
More information:
Code:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/585.John_Steinbeck |
Cannery Row series
John Steinbeck - Cannery Row (read by Jerry Farden)
John Steinbeck - Sweet Thursday (read by Jerry Farden)
Other
John Steinbeck - Of Mice And Men (read by Mark Hammer)
John Steinbeck - The Grapes Of Wrath (read by Dylan Baker)
John Steinbeck - East Of Eden (read by Richard Poe)
John Steinbeck - The Pearl (read by Frank Muller)
John Steinbeck - Travels With Charley: In Search Of America (read by Ron McLarty)
John Steinbeck - Tortilla Flat (read by John McDonough)
John Steinbeck - The Moon Is Down (read by George Gwidell)
John Steinbeck - In Dubious Battle (read by Tom Stechschulte)
John Steinbeck - The Wayward Bus (read by Richard Poe)
John Steinbeck - The Acts Of King Arthur And His Noble Knights (read by Robert Fass)
John Steinbeck - The Log From The Sea Of Cortez (read by Joe Barrett)
John Steinbeck - The Long Valley (read by Holter Graham)
John Steinbeck - Cup Of Gold (read by Patrick Horgan)
John Steinbeck - The Columbia Literary Series (read by John Steinbeck)
Code:
Cannery Row series
http://rapidgator.net/file/3407a4dcd26d4251a307b3641709ce6e/Cannery_Row.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/1f3ae8032502a92da5f9ef889b5ea199/Sweet_Thursday.rar.html
Other
http://rapidgator.net/file/1371902854e105be415875d38f316a46/Of_Mice_And_Men.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/beacbc20084caaef2e762cab40a1d544/The_Grapes_Of_Wrath.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/155c5aefa37658160d3da3e515454668/East_Of_Eden.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/ffef9f6cf7ee0f8169473fe1bec7e067/The_Pearl.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/8e3088baaf252e9fcab8b00ea78bcb3d/Travels_With_Charley.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/116470c23afe32f15be7e4a327be297c/Tortilla_Flat.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/2f76f797c4761c3e9010500cf948eb4d/The_Moon_Is_Down.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/0da0530a9727f86e0d535577785498c9/In_Dubious_Battle.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/b81119404c581a7d436ad2b660765105/The_Wayward_Bus.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/5967881f85f78a8a397e32179ef8098c/The_Acts_Of_King_Arthur_And_His_Noble_Knights.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/976489cd6c367888f8026ae3d7afcf84/The_Log_From_The_Sea_Of_Cortez.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/94ba07d0e9238976f50eb51a5715f4b1/The_Long_Valley.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/bb339f94e8f995857725f06444d3e516/Cup_Of_Gold.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/add4b8abd1ed3d9d34345c909faf8ad5/The_Columbia_Literary_Series.rar.html |
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