After they both secure jobs working the fields of the Salinas Valley - Steinbeck’s own hometown - their dream seems more attainable than ever. Their goal: to own an acre of land and a shack. Lennie, who has a mild mental disability, is steadfastly faithful to his friend George, but he has a habit of getting into trouble. Two poor migrant workers, George and Lennie, are working for the American dream in California during the Great Depression. His most well-known novels include Of Mice and Men (1937), Grapes of Wrath (1939) and East of Eden (1952). Steinbeck wrote 31 books over the course of his career. He briefly moved to New York City, where he found work as a construction worker and a newspaper reporter, but then returned to California, where he took a job as a caretaker in Lake Tahoe and began his writing career. Over the next six years, Steinbeck drifted in and out of school, eventually dropping out for good in 1925, without a degree.įollowing Stanford, Steinbeck tried to make a go of it as a freelance writer. In 1919, Steinbeck enrolled at Stanford University - a decision that had more to do with pleasing his parents than anything else - but the budding writer would prove to have little use for college. According to accounts, Steinbeck decided to become a writer at the age of 14, often locking himself in his bedroom to write poems and stories. He formed an early appreciation for the land and in particular California's Salinas Valley, which would greatly inform his later writing. His mother, Olive Hamilton Steinbeck, was a former schoolteacher.įor the most part, Steinbeck - who grew up with three sisters - had a happy childhood.
His father, John Ernst Steinbeck, tried his hand at several different jobs to keep his family fed: He owned a feed-and-grain store, managed a flour plant and served as treasurer of Monterey County. was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California.
Steinbeck served as a war correspondent during World War II, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. His 1939 novel, The Grapes of Wrath, about the migration of a family from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to California, won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. His works often dealt with social and economic issues. Steinbeck dropped out of college and worked as a manual laborer before achieving success as a writer. John Steinbeck was a Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and the author of Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden.
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