One evening, after being left alone for a bit too long, his beloved Irish setter, Toby, decided to devour the first half of Steinbeck's manuscript for Of Mice and Men.
Luckily, Steinbeck was an avid dog-lover , so he took the incident in stride and spent the next two months rewriting his work. But by , the author had abandoned the project and never completed it before his death in In , though, the unfinished manuscript was posthumously released and remains in print today.
After playwright Arthur Miller refused to name names of suspected communists during an investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee HUAC in , he was brought to trial and was found guilty of contempt of Congress in May In the essay, Steinbeck expressed his distaste for the intrusive and speculative nature of HUAC, calling the trial "one of the strangest and most frightening dilemmas that a people and a government has ever faced.
John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California, and used the region as the setting for many of his books, including the short story collection The Long Valley. Salinas plays an even bigger role in 's East of Eden , which Steinbeck called "almost the autobiography of the Valley.
While working and living on the property, he also found time to finish his first book, Cup of Gold , which was published in By far the most fulsomely reviewed and controversial book of the decade was his first novel after Grapes , The Moon Is Down The book, distributed by underground presses in occupied countries, inspired European readers and appalled many Americans.
Reviewers seemed either to misunderstand his biological naturalism or to expect him to compose another strident social critique like The Grapes of Wrath. A humorous text like Cannery Row struck many as fluff. Reviews noted this as another slim volume by a major author. Steinbeck faltered both professionally and personally in the s.
He divorced the loyal but volatile Carol in That same year he moved east with his second wife, Gwyndolyn Conger, a lovely and talented woman nearly twenty years his junior who ultimately resented his growing stature and felt that her own creativity as a singer had been stifled. In he met and in married his third wife, Elaine Scott, and with her he moved again to New York City, where he lived for the rest of his life.
With Viva Zapata! Certainly with his divorce from Gwyn, Steinbeck had endured dark nights of the soul, and East of Eden contains those turbulent emotions surrounding the subjects of wife, children, family, and fatherhood. And I shall keep these two separate. With her, he became more social. Perhaps his writing suffered as a result; some claim that even East of Eden , his most ambitious post- Grapes novel, cannot stand shoulder to shoulder with his searing social novels of the s.
In he published his last work of fiction, the ambitious The Winter of Our Discontent , a novel about contemporary America set in a fictionalized Sag Harbor where he and Elaine had a summer home. Increasingly disillusioned with American greed, waste, and spongy morality—his own sons seemed textbook cases—he wrote his jeremiad, a lament for an ailing populace.
Wounded by the blindside attack, unwell, frustrated, and disillusioned, John Steinbeck wrote no more fiction. But the writer John Steinbeck was not silenced. As always, he wrote reams of letters to his many friends and associates.
In a camper truck designed to his specification, he toured America in His disenchantment with American waste, greed, and immorality ran deep. His last published book, America and Americans , reconsiders the American character, the land, the racial crisis, and the crumbling will. In these late years, in fact after his final move to New York in , many accused him of increasing conservatism.
But the author who wrote The Grapes of Wrath never really retreated into conservatism. He lived in modest houses all his life, caring little for lavish displays of power or wealth. He preferred talking to ordinary citizens wherever he traveled, sympathizing always with the disenfranchised.
He was a Stevenson Democrat in the s; he was never a communist in the s, and after three trips to Russia , , and he hated Soviet repression. In fact, neither during his life nor after has the paradoxical Steinbeck been an easy author to pigeonhole personally, politically, or artistically.
The text of Mice , he hoped, would also be the script for a play—an experiment that failed when it was performed in San Francisco shortly after the book was published. The two friends depend on one another in a world where most working men are lonely, moving from job to job. Steinbeck called his book a little study in humility—it went on to become one of his most beloved books.
Its roots are journalistic. In the fall of , he was asked by the San Francisco News , a liberal publication, to investigate conditions in migrant labor camps near Bakersfield, California. He also describes life in a federal government camp, where workers were given decent housing and running water. Both his wrath and his optimism are woven into The Grapes of Wrath , a book that he researched for nearly two years after his first investigative trip to the Central Valley.
There are about five thousand families starving to death over there…The states and counties will give them nothing because they are outsiders. But the crops of any part of this state could not be harvested without these outsiders. His sympathy for the plight of migrant workers led to a backlash against him: in Oklahoma the book made the state look poverty stricken , in California the book made farmers and growers seem greedy and selfish and in many other parts of the country the gritty language of the Joads was shocking for many.
In August of the Kern County Board of Supervisors banned the book from schools and libraries in , a ban that lasted until Throughout most of the s, Steinbeck had shunned publicity, and the firestorm over The Grapes of Wrath swamped him. He fell ill and his marriage to Carol began to fall apart—Steinbeck wished only to retreat from the publicity and requests for money and aid.
In March he and his close friend, marine biologist Ed Ricketts, sailed to the Gulf of California to collect marine specimens. Carol went along, although she is scarcely mentioned in the subsequent book. In , Carol and John separated, divorcing in Steinbeck was a patriot, as were many Americans after Pearl Harbor, as the U.
Denied a commission in the armed forces because of his suspected communist leanings—he was investigated by the FBI after the publication of Grapes —Steinbeck devoted himself to writing propaganda for the war effort. That same year he published another play-novelette, The Moon is Down , about an occupied village in Northern Europe.
He imagined what it would be like to live in a town where freedoms disappeared—and to many Europeans, he seemed to have captured the terror of Nazi occupation. Steinbeck threw himself into the war effort, and his letters to Gwyn during this period reflect his patriotism as well as fascination with ordinary lives:. Hell, I thought I was building the war up. Certainly we were thinking more universally. While traveling to Mexico to help with the film adaptation of the novel, Steinbeck became inspired by the story of Emiliano Zapata, and subsequently wrote a screenplay based on his life.
Ed Ricketts had been hit by a train while attempting to cross the tracks in Monterey. The book was later adapted into a film directed by Elia Kazan and starring James Dean in his first major movie role. Dean was later nominated for an Academy Award for his performance, which he received posthumously. It wasn't until Tortilla Flat , a humorous novel about paisano life in the Monterey region was released, that the writer achieved real success.
Steinbeck struck a more serious tone with In Dubious Battle and The Long Valley , a collection of short stories. In , the author received the Nobel Prize for Literature — "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception. Around this same time, he traveled to Mexico to collect marine life with friend Edward F. Ricketts, a marine biologist. Their collaboration resulted in the book Sea of Cortez , which describes marine life in the Gulf of California.
Steinbeck was married three times and had two sons. In , Steinbeck met and married his first wife, Carol Henning. Over the following decade, he poured himself into his writing with Carol's support and paycheck, until the couple divorced in Steinbeck was married to his second wife, Gwyndolyn Conger, from to The couple had two sons together, Thomas born and John born
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