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John Steinbeck (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)

Biography

Salinas, California, over the hill from Monterey and close enough to Big Sur that John Steinbeck's mother was able to teach there, has long had the climate to grow some of the most profitable crops in the United States. When Steinbeck was born there in 1902, that part of the central California coast, some one hundred miles south of San Francisco, was quite untouched by the kind of industrial civilization that had grown up in the East, from which Steinbeck's family had come.

The father, John Ernst Steinbeck, born in Florida, had followed his parents to...

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