John Steinbeck / A brief biography

John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck

A brief biography

Susan Shillinglaw

Saturday 2 February 2002

Born on February 27 1902 in Salinas, California, John Steinbeck set his early fiction in and around the Salinas Valley, fertile agricultural land near the Pacific. California's only Nobel prize-winning novelist, Steinbeck put Monterey County on the map of the world. By writing so convincingly about places that mattered to him - Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row, the Salinas Valley and the Pacific coast - he showed why community, landscape, and environment are abiding concerns. Vital to Steinbeck's work is the delicate and intimate engagement between humans and the places they inhabit.

He was also one of 20th-century America's most socially engaged artists. He cared about the plight of people on the margins - people who worked, migrants forced from poverty to homelessness, lonely farmers, and, in a frothier fiction, bums and paisanos who lounged in tiny enclaves of harmony.

In 1938, while writing his most famous novel, The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck wrote: "In every bit of honest writing in the world there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love." His work is accessible, for he wanted to reach a broad audience with his lucid prose, and it is marked by the tenacity of his social vision, the largeness of his heart, and the clarity and variety of his fictional and journalistic terrain.

He left California after finishing his labour trilogy of the late 1930s: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the book considered by many his finest, The Grapes Of Wrath (1939). In the 1940s, declaring that the novel "as we know it" is dead, Steinbeck turned to marine biology and wrote Sea Of Cortez (1941), to filmmaking in Mexico and wrote a strong documentary about a cholera epidemic in a small Mexican village, The Forgotten Village (1941).

During the second world war, he wrote a controversial play-novelette about an occupied Northern European village, The Moon Is Down (1942).

In 1943 he accepted an assignment with the Herald Tribune as a war correspondent. His dispatches from London, North Africa, and off the Italian coast were collected in 1958 as Once There Was A War. He covered postwar Russia with Robert Capa in A Russian Journal (1948), and, in the 1950s wrote numerous journalistic pieces for American magazines and newspapers as he and his third wife, Elaine Steinbeck, toured the world. He wrote to Elaine, "Home is people and where you work well." His last trip was another journalistic assignment - coverage of the Vietnam War, a war he supported for a time. His hawkish stance lost him a liberal audience, although Steinbeck never lost his own sense of himself as a man exploring the lives of those who were exploited by powerful interests beyond their control. Of his later fiction, he is best remembered for East Of Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley. He won the Nobel Prize in 1962 and died in 1968.

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