Miss it Miss out - I'm deadly serious - This guy rocks! (John Steinbeck in general)

Member Name: Jackal123

Product:	John Steinbeck in general
Date:	03/01/02 (139 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: brilliant

Disadvantages: nothing!

Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California in 1902. His family owned land in the area, but they were not rich. As a youth he loved the outdoors and nature, but he also read widely. He attended Salinas High School until 1919 when he went to Stanford University to study marine biology. He took a number of jobs to help him pay his way through university, including a job on a ranch near King City in the Salinas Valley. He left university in 1925 without taking a degree, determined to be a writer. He had a number of jobs before his first novel, Cup of Gold, about the 17th century pirate Henry Morgan, was published in 1929.

Most of his early work is set in Southern California and describes the life of people working on the land. The Pastures of Heaven (1932), To a God Unknown (1933), Tortilla Flat (1935), In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), The Long Valley (1938) and The Red Pony (1938) are all set in this area and portray realistically the lives of working men and women. The natural world he portrays is beautiful but it is also wild and can be cruel and savage. His characters are often poor and oppressed caught up in a battle for survival against nature or against their fellow men. Steinbeck?s best known work, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), is an account of a family from the impoverished Oklahoma dust bowl migrating to California during the economic depression of the 1930s. It was accepted not only as realistic fiction, but also as a moving document of social protest against the way such migrant workers were exploited.

The world Steinbeck portrays in his early novels and short stories is essentially a world of men, and violence is a common occurrence. His female characters are often peripheral to the action and briefly sketched in. There are no deep psychological insights into his characters and relationships are rarely explored. Relationships between men and women, in particular, are characterised by a lack of communication and so of incompre
hension. Men and women rarely understand each other in Steinbeck?s novels. Men?s horses and dogs seem to be a more natural part of their lives than their women do.

During the war years Steinbeck worked for the American government and in 1943 he went to Europe as a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. His later works include The Moon is Down (1942), Cannery Row (1944), The Wayward Bus (1947), East of Eden (1952), The Winter of Discontent (1961), and America and Americans (1968). In 1962 he wrote Travels with Charley, an autobiographical account of a trip across America with his pet poodle Charley. He lived the latter part of his life in New York City where he died in 1968.

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