The Life of John Steinbeck
* (1902-1968), born in Salinas, California.
* He worked his way through college at Stanford University but never graduated.
* In 1925 he went to New York, where he tried for a few years to establish himself as a free-lance writer, but he failed and returned to California. After publishing some novels and short stories, Steinbeck first became widely known with Tortilla Flat (1935), a series of humorous stories about Monterey paisanos.
* Steinbeck's novels can all be classified as social novels dealing with the economic problems of rural labour, but there is also a streak of worship of the soil in his books, which does not always agree with his matter-of-fact sociological approach.
Facts About John Steinbeck: Writing Career
* John Steinbeck’s first novel was titled ‘Cup of Gold’ and was published in 1929. In 1935 he published ‘Tortilla Flat’ which received critical acclaim and won the California Commonwealth Club’s Gold Medal.
* John Steinbeck had found his ‘writer’s voice’ writing fiction set in the area known as the California Dust Bowl and in the time of the great depression.
* In 1939, he published ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ where he describes the perils of a family of sharecroppers who are driven from their land due to the dust storms in the California Dust Bowl. The book is set in the time of the great depression.
* ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ attracted its share of controversy, however. It showed the ugly side of capitalism and the re-interpretation of the events of the Dust Bowl migrations led to people claiming that the book misrepresented facts about the area. The book was even banned from public schools and libraries till 1941.
1. Although many people believe him to be a lifelong Californian, Steinbeck spent much of his life in New York and eventually shed most of his ties to the Salinas Valley.
2. Hollywood loved Steinbeck. Film adaptations of his work include The Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row, East of Eden, Of Mice and Men, The Red Pony, and Tortilla Flat.
3. Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962 “for his realistic as well as imaginative writings, distinguished by a sympathetic humor and a keen social perception.” Privately, however, he feared that the prize usually spelled the end of a writer’s career.
4. The two things Steinbeck found most necessary to life were “work and women.”
* As John Steinbeck was developing as a writer, events taking place in the United States provided him with plenty of material to write about. In October 1929 the U.S. stock market crashed, sparking the Great Depression. From 1930 to 1936, severe drought plagued the Great Plains of the American Midwest, which at the time were mostly farmland. The entire region became known as the Dust Bowl.
* In 1937 he published Of Mice and Men. The plot centers on two migrant ranch hands, George and the mentally challenged Lennie, and their simple yet ultimately thwarted dream of owning their own land.Though the book is required reading in many schools— maybe it's even the reason you're reading this biography right now—it is also among the most frequently challenged and banned books in American libraries and schools. The novel has been criticized for everything from its coarse language to its depiction of the mentally disabled to its seeming anti-business slant. Steinbeck was not a man who wrote for shock value. His goal with Of Mice and Men—and with the rest of his fiction—was to heal the wounds between people by helping them to understand one another's lives. "In every bit of honest writing in the world . . . there is a base theme. Try to understand men, [for] if you understand each other you will be kind to each other,"
The Great Depression
* The Great Depression was an economic slump in North America, Europe, and other industrialized areas of the world that began in 1929 and lasted until about 1939. It was the longest and most severe depression ever experienced by the industrialized Western world.
* Though the U.S. economy had gone into depression six months earlier, the Great Depression may be said to have begun with a catastrophic collapse of stock-market prices on the New York Stock Exchange in October 1929. During the next three years stock prices in the United States continued to fall, until by late 1932 they had dropped to only about 20 percent of their value in 1929.
* by 1933, 11,000 of the United States' 25,000 banks had failed. The failure of so many banks, combined with a general and nationwide loss of confidence in the economy, led to much-reduced levels of spending and demand and hence of production, thus aggravating the downward spiral. The result was drastically falling output and drastically rising unemployment; by 1932, U.S. manufacturing output had fallen to 54 percent of its 1929 level, and unemployment had risen to between 12 and 15 million workers, or 25-30 percent of the work force.
* The Great Depression began in the United States but quickly turned into a worldwide economic slump owing to the special and intimate relationships that had been forged between the United States and European economies after World War I.
* Some history books mark the start of the Depression as October 29, 1929. On that day, the value of stocks traded in the New York Stock Exchange dropped dramatically. In just three days, investors lost over $5 billion. By the end of the year, stock values dropped another $11 billion. Banks and investment companies that had put money in stocks lost fortunes. Factories began to close, laying off workers. Hard times were coming.
Migrant Farmers Depression Era
* The Depression was one of the most devastating agricultural disasters in American history, and American farmers suffered terribly. In 1934 more than 30 percent of all Americans still lived on farms, and agriculture—even in that drought year—produced $9.5 billion. But a combination of natural disasters and human miscalculations devastated American farming in the 1930s. The decade opened with a series of natural catastrophes: in 1930 hail destroyed wheat crops, and 1932 to 1935 were years of unrelenting drought. This, combined with plummeting agricultural prices, ruined countless farm families.
* During World War I, farmers worked hard to produce record crops and livestock. When prices fell they tried to produce even more to pay their debts, taxes and living expenses. In the early 1930s prices dropped so low that many farmers went bankrupt and lost their farms.
* Farmers struggled with low prices all through the 1920s, but after 1929 things began to be hard for city workers as well. After the stock market crash, many businesses started to close or to lay off workers. Many families did not have money to buy things, and consumer demand for manufactured goods fell off. Fewer families were buying new cars or household appliances. People learned to do without new clothing. Many families could not pay their rent.
* When the national economy became weak, farm prices fell and many farmers could not even sell their products for as much as it cost to produce them. Some farmers thought the way to raise farm prices was by organizing protest strikes in the early 1930s.
