The Red Pony | John Steinbeck Biography
John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California, on February 27, 1902, the son of John Ernst, a government employee, and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck, a schoolteacher. He grew up in the midst of an agricultural community on the east side of the coastal mountains, and when he turned seventeen, he began a six-year relationship with Stanford University, sporadically attending classes in literature and writing but never attaining a degree. In 1925, he gave up furthering his education and moved to New York City, where he worked for a time as a laborer on the construction project of Madison Square Garden. He became discouraged about not finding a publisher for his writing, so one year later he returned to California.
He lived off and on at his parents' home, even after marrying Carol Henning, the first of his three wives. He continued to write, and in 1929 Cup of Gold, his first novel, was published. It was not until 1935 that Steinbeck enjoyed commercial success with his fourth novel, Tortilla Flat, and from that point on his career as a writer was set. In the next sixteen years, he would write eleven novels, numerous short stories, three plays, and five movie scripts. His most notable works include Of Mice and Men (1937), which was made into a play in the same year and adapted for film many times; The Red Pony (1937), which was made into a movie in 1949 and adapted for television in 1973; The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which was made into a movie in 1940 and 1991; Cannery Row (1945), which was adapted as a movie in 1984, and East of Eden (1952), which was adapted as a movie in 1954 and again in 1984.
During World War II Steinbeck worked as a foreign correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, first stationed in North Africa and then Italy. Later, during the Vietnam War he also was a foreign correspondent, this time for Newsday.
Steinbeck's themes often revolved around what he saw as the evils of materialism, and his books were often his attempts to fight for human dignity and compassion in the wake of political and corporate corruption and rampant poverty. The Grapes of Wrath, probably his most famous work, was both widely read as well as banned and burned. Steinbeck spent two years living with farmers who had lost their lands in the Dust Bowl and migrated from Oklahoma to California in search of a better life, in order to gain firsthand experience in the hard luck of their lives. In 1940, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his efforts.
Steinbeck would go on to win many more awards in his lifetime, including the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962. He also won an Academy Award nomination for best original story for his screenplay Lifeboat. After his success with Grapes of Wrath, however, critics maintained that Steinbeck had lost the passion in his writing, some even going so far as to state that he won the Nobel Prize mostly for his early works.
Steinbeck moved back to New York in his latter years, somewhat disappointed by the reaction of the citizens of his hometown of Salinas. This was a conservative group of people who found Steinbeck and his novels too liberal and thus too disruptive for their tastes. He married Gwyndolyn Conger by whom he had two sons, one of whom was tragically addicted to codeine at the age of seven and would go on to write his own book, criticizing his father as a parent. In 1950, Steinbeck married Elaine Scott. On December 20, 1968, while in New York, he died of a heart attack.
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