The Oxford Companion to American Literature | Steinbeck, John [Ernst]
Steinbeck, John [Ernst]( 1902–68), California novelist, attended Stanford University (1919–20, 1922–23, 1924–25), and worked at odd jobs, beginning his literary career with Cup of Gold (1929), a romantic novel based on the career of Sir Henry Morgan, the buccaneer. This was followed by The Pastures of Heaven (1932), a collection of short stories portraying the people of a farm community in a California valley. His second novel, To a God Unknown (1933), tells of a California farmer whose pagan religion of fertility becomes a mystical obsession, and after a season of drought leads to his suicide as a sacrifice on the sylvan altar at which he has worshiped.
Tortilla Flat (1935) won Steinbeck popular attention for the first time, with its sympathetically humorous depiction of the lives of Monterey paisanos. In Dubious Battle (1936), the story of a strike of migratory fruit pickers, was the first of his...
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