John Steinbeck
February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968
John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was an American writer. He is one of the most widely read authors of the 20th century and has written numerous novels, short stories, novellas and screenplays. He worked as a journalist for a time and was a war correspondent during the Second World War in 1943. In 1940 he received the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Grapes of Wrath and in 1962 the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Three of John Steinbeck's four grandparents were immigrants from Europe. His paternal grandfather was the carpenter Johann Adolph Großsteinbeck ( 27 Nov. 1832; † 10 Aug. 1913 in Hollister), who shortened his name to Steinbeck in America. He came from Heiligenhaus near Düsseldorf, where a Großsteinbeck estate still exists today. On 1 July 1854, he married the American missionary's daughter Almira Anne Dickson ( 2 Oct. 1828; † 1 March 1923) in Palestine. Both belonged to families who had been living there in the evangelical Messianic settlement ‘Mount Hope’ since 1854. After neighbouring Arabs committed a robbery and two rapes on family members in January 1858, the couple emigrated to the USA in 1858.
There the family first lived in Massachusetts, later in Florida and - after he deserted from the Confederate army during the Civil War - in California. There he settled down as a dairy farmer. Johann Adolph's adventurous and unsettled life later inspired his grandson to create the character of Adam Trask in Beyond Eden, and other characters in this work could also reflect the Palestinian experiences of his paternal grandparents, and he also created a literary monument to his maternal grandparents in this novel: Samuel Hamilton, from Ballykelly in Northern Ireland, and his wife Elizabeth Fagen. The two of them ran a farm near King City. Like most of his novels and stories, Beyond Eden is set in the area around Salinas and Monterey, now known as Steinbeck Country, around 150 kilometres south of San Francisco. John Steinbeck and his two sisters grew up in Salinas.
Their parents were John Ernst Steinbeck II and the teacher Olive Hamilton. The father had initially managed a mill, which went bankrupt in 1910, causing the family temporary financial difficulties. As a bookkeeper for a sugar factory and finally as treasurer of Monterey County, John Ernst Steinbeck regained a modest level of prosperity and took up a respected position in Salinas. John Steinbeck showed a keen interest in literature even as a schoolboy and began to write stories himself. In 1919, he successfully applied to study at the prestigious Stanford University, where he took courses in English literature, classical literature and ancient history, journalism and other subjects that he considered useful for a career as a writer. This included a course on writing short stories, which can be considered one of the first creative writing courses at American universities, and his admission to an elite private university, which seemed to guarantee social advancement, initially raised high expectations for him and his parents. Steinbeck soon became disillusioned with academic life, however, and immersed himself in extensive reading on his own initiative. During the semester breaks, he worked on farms, construction sites, factories and in other industries for increasingly long periods of time. In 1924, he finally left Stanford without a degree. His studies were far less formative for him and his work than the odd jobs with which he had financed them. It was in these jobs that he got to know the milieu of the people who would later be at the centre of many of his works.
In 1925, Steinbeck went to New York City as a journalist and freelance writer, but found little favour there. He therefore soon returned to California, where he once again made a living from odd jobs. In 1929, he published his first novel: Cup of Gold, a biography of the English privateer Henry Morgan. But this, like The Valley of Heaven (1932) and the two works that followed, went almost unnoticed by critics. Steinbeck and his first wife, Carol Henning, whom he married in 1930, lived in financially straitened circumstances, alternating between San Francisco, Eagle Rock near Los Angeles and his parents' holiday home in Pacific Grove near Monterey.
Steinbeck experienced his first success in 1935 with the episodic novel Tortilla Flat, in which he describes the life of a clique of destitute but fun-loving Hispanics modelled on King Arthur's mythical Round Table.
After the publication of his novel In Dubious Battle, which deals with a farm labour strike, Steinbeck accepted a commission from the San Francisco News newspaper in 1936 to write a series of articles about uprooted migrant workers from the ‘Dust Bowl’, the drought-stricken regions of the Midwest of the USA. Hordes of ‘Okies’, completely impoverished former farmers from Oklahoma, moved to California in search of jobs. The experiences Steinbeck gathered while researching this topic were incorporated into his two works that continue to impress critics and audiences to this day: the 1937 novella Of Mice and Men and the 1939 socially critical novel The Grapes of Wrath.
This novel, a bestseller that had already sold 430,000 copies by the beginning of 1940 and which John Ford made into a film shortly afterwards, was rejected in conservative circles as class warfare and was even banned in California for a time. Steinbeck never saw himself as a socialist in the dogmatic sense, although he had strong sympathies for the political left and visited the Soviet Union for the first time in 1937. He was a staunch supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's ‘New Deal’ policy. Roosevelt, who invited Steinbeck to the White House twice over the next few years. Despite all the hostility, The Grapes of Wrath earned its author the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 1940. Due to its realistic depiction of the misery of migrant labourers, the book is still regarded today not only as a great literary work, a Great American Novel, but also as a first-rate historical source. Steinbeck was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1939.
At the latest after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 and America's entry into the war, Steinbeck felt obliged to support the fight against National Socialist Germany in his own way. He readily accepted an invitation from the newly founded ‘Foreign Information Service’ (F.I.S.) in Washington, D.C. (which, among other things, was to coordinate propaganda and had already recruited the writers Thornton Wilder and Robert E. Sherwood) to develop a project suitable for propaganda purposes - which then became the play The Moon Is Down (1942), a striking propaganda piece. Adapted into a novel, the work was published in Switzerland in 1943. Translations printed and distributed underground in several European countries occupied by the National Socialists did not fail to have an impact.
At the same time, a marriage crisis occurred in Steinbeck's private life. In 1941 he had met the twenty-year-old singer Gwendolyn “Gwyn” Conger in Hollywood, where he participated in the filming of fruits of anger, and began an affair with her, which eventually led to the separation of Carol. At the beginning of 1943 he moved to New York with Gwyn, and in March they married. Soon, however, there was a first crisis between the two, whereupon Steinbeck was hired as a war reporter at the New York Herald Tribune to be sent to Europe. Previously, he wrote a script for a film about the training of American bomber pilots (Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team) and for Alfred Hitchcock the first screenplay draft on the Wardrama Lifeboat (the lifeboat), which the 20th Century Fox then brought to the cinemas in 1944 in a version strongly criticized by Steinbeck. From June to October 1943 Steinbeck was a war reporter in the Second World War. He witnessed the landing of the Allies in Italy and wrote about it reports as well as his diary notes under the title Once there was a War (the gates of hell). Just as empathy as before, the working-class environments described the everyday life of the soldiers – not as heroic history, but as the desperate attempt to survive in constant danger.
In 1944, Steinbeck with his wife and both first son Thomas – the second, John IV – returned to Monterey in 1946. Already in 1930 he had been friends with the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, who showed him the ecological connections of life and gained great importance for his view of the world. With the figure of the doc, Steinbeck set him a literary monument in 1945 in the novel Cannery Row (the road of the oil curtains) and in 1947 in his sequel Sweet Thursday.
Steinbeck followed the Nuremberg trial against the main war criminals before the International Military Court in 1945 from the press gallery. In 1947 he travelled with his wife through Scandinavia and France. After a visit to the Soviet Union in 1947, this time with photographer Robert Capa, the travel report A Russian Journal was published. Russian Diary. The death of his longtime friend Ed Ricketts in May 1948 followed in August the separation of Gwyn and the divorce that same year. In 1949, Steinbeck met the self-confident Texan Elaine Anderson Scott, who became known as the Broadway theater director and then went to Hollywood. In 1950 he married her and moved with her and her daughter to New York.
It followed unstetetete years with long journeys through North Africa, South and Western Europe, until John Steinbeck succeeded in 1952 another great literary litter: The epic novel East of Eden. Beyond Eden) tells the story of the Trask and Hamilton families from the Civil War to the First World War. In the same year, the film Viva Zapata!, for which Steinbeck wrote the screenplay: a film about the Mexican revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata, directed by Elia Kazan with Marlon Brando in the title role. The same director filmed three years later with the young James Dean. In 1954, Steinbeck received the Medal of Freedom from the President of the United States. In the same year, he suffered a minor stroke during a trip to Europe. In the late 1950s he and Elaine lived temporarily in Somerset, England, where he worked on a modern version of the artussage, The Acts of King Arthur and his noble Knight.
Steinbeck spent the last years of his life on his remote and well-hidden small fishing grounds in Sag Harbor, Long Island. From there he started a tour through the United States in the autumn of 1960 with a small truck converted into a motorhome. His report on this journey, on which he was accompanied only by his Pudel Charley, was published in 1961 as an article series and in 1962 as a book under the title Travels with Charley: "Search of America". The journey with Charley: In Search of America. Steinbeck is critical of American society, as in 1966 in America and Americans. America and the Americans. In 1962, at Sag Harbor, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he received as the sixth American.
In the 1960s he supported President Lyndon B. Johnson for his project of a socially just "Great Society". The legal abolition of racial segregation and improved social legislation were demands for which Steinbeck had stood up since the 1930s. However, his personal friendship with Johnson led him to become one of the few intellectuals of the time who supported the Vietnam War. As a result, his son John, who had become a war correspondent in Vietnam, became a convinced pacifist. In 1967 Steinbeck himself made a trip to Vietnam, but returned as a sick man and was no longer able to write. In early 1966 he had visited his grandparents' early residence in Tel Aviv on a trip to Israel. He died at the age of 66 in New York City. His ashes were buried in the cemetery of his home.