Early Days

John Steinbeck's father, who came to California shortly after the Civil War, for many years occupied a position as treasurer of Monterey County; thenovelist's mother was a teacher in the public schools of the Salinas Valley.In contrast with the father-ranging locales found in the fiction ofHemingway and Henry James, for instance, the frequent appearance inSteinbeck's novels and stories of the California valleys and theirinhabitants underlines the novelist's link with his parents' involvements.

John Ernst Steinbeck, born in Salinas on February 27, 1902, repeatedly demonstrates in his work his sensitivity to nature and to natural processes, so much of which he studied and learned about in the context of the California where he was born and which he loved. In addition, his fiction abounds with the paisanos, the migrant laborers, the exploited men and women, the union organizers, the marine scientists whose affections, concerns and fears the writer had such abundant opportunity to observe. What is more, Steinbeck has made statements about his early years testifying to his experience of literature at home-he mentions Paradise Lost, Crime and Punishment, The Return of the Native, Madame Bovary among others as works with which he had a very early acquaintance. Here, no doubt, his mother's profession contributed directly to the burgeoning writer's direction. Nor was his father uninvolved in the boy's artistic adventures; Steinbeck's early fiction was written in cast-off accountant's ledgers!

Steinbeck kept very busy in high school. He wrote for the school paper; he belonged to the basketball and track teams; he was elected president of his senior class. When school was out, he spent vacations working as a hired hand on local ranches. After he graduated, and before his entrance to Stanford University, he worked as an assistant chemist in a local sugar-beet factory. His attendance at Standford was not continuous. He was an English major, attended intermittently over a period of five years, did not get a degree; he wrote some vagabond stories and poems, commonly satirical, for the college newspaper and magazine. Perhaps as important to his future career as his academic involvements were his periods of employment while he was not attending classes. He worked on ranches and on a road gang, where he learned about verbal and behavioral traits which he later incorporated into his work.

In later years he would write to his agents letters justifying unusual aspects of conversational passages in his books by drawing on his memory of such observations. In 1925, having amassed less than half the number of credits required for graduation, Steinbeck left Stanford permanently; he went to New York City to become a writer. His brief stay, unsuccessful and anonymous, interestingly recalls William Faulkner's journey to New York five years before. Of all major 20th century novelists probably these two made most consistent and profound use of their provincial environment. Faulkner too had come to the big city right after brief stays at the local university - University of Mississippi; Faulkner too worked briefly in an irrelevant job - the book department of Lord and Taylor's; Faulkner too left quickly and went back to his home area. Steinbeck spent his time in New York as laborer and reported, failed in his attempt to publish some short stories, and returned to California as a deck hand on a ship returning via the Panama Canal. When he returned to New York fifteen years later, a writer now famous and respected, he still viewed the city unfavorably. In California again, Steinbeck got a job as caretaker of a Lake Tahoe estate; he was fired from that position when a tree fell through the roof. He then worked in a fish hatchery nearby. During this period of two years the writer finished his first novel to be published, Cup of Gold, Morgan, Buccaneer, with Occasional Reference to History. It was his fourth A Life of Sir Henry attempt at a novel, got few reviews and little recognition.

The Salinas Valley

This valley, "Steinbeck country," runs roughly north and south, paralleling the California coast about thirty miles from the shoreline. The southern end of the valley, divided into large fields, grows lettuce, broccoli and other vegetables; cattle feed on nearby hill slopes. The town of Salinas itself, Steinbeck's home town, ten miles from Monterey Bay, is the county seat-somewhat urbanized, but essentially involved with the growers, cattlemen and workers of the environment. The lettuce-growing complex has been the scene of severe labor-management disputes; before the second World War a strike by the local workers was ruthlessly put down. During this period normal judicial processes were suspended, violence characterized some aspects of the struggle, and after a month the union lost. The region in general features interestingly divergent social groups. The picturesque harbor includes fishermen and cannery workers from various backgrounds, Japanese, Portuguese and Italian, involved largely with the sardine trade. In addition, survivals from old Spanish mission days draw interested tourists. Carmel is not far; artists and writers have found it a congenial home and find its lack of rigid social rules inviting.

Carey McWilliams, writer, critic, editor, has underlined the idiosyncratic aspects of the vineyards, orchards and ranches in the area. While the old tradition of individual initiative and adventure still remains, as embodied in the life styles of fishermen, aspects of bohemian socialization and some traits of ranch hand behavior, vegetable growing and cattle raising are highly collectivized. Big business, they feature a distinct separation between ownership and management. Freeman Champney points out that the region has been typically a terrain of extremes-poverty and riches, economic upper class and mobile, untutored working people. The area lacked a stable middle class, and all the continuous, responsible communal concern that such a class often means. The reader will note the relevance of these sociological generalizations when he examines Of Mice and Men. Another environmental feature of the greatest importance to the development of Steinbeck's thought is the great variety of marine life in the Bay. With Edward Ricketts, a marine biologist and close friend, Steinbeck in 1941 published Sea of Cortez, a journal of travel and resesrch in marine biology. This study summed up some aspects of the novelist's long-standing interest in animal behavior and scientific objectivity.

After The First Novel

In 1930, at the age of twenty-eight, Steinbeck married. He went to live in Pacific Grove; his father gave him $25.00 a month and a small house. He wrote 30,000 words of a novel, and a thriller, Murder at Full Moon. The latter, a piece of hack work done in the hope of quick cash, he was quickly unhappy with. He soon withdrew both from his agents. His next important work, published in 1933, was To a God Unknown, a novel in which Steinbeck suggests the deep-lying need of man for ritualistic and magical behavior. Neither of the first two published novels made money. But Steinbeck kept on; he was also writing short stories, planning some articles based on a tentative 400-mile horseback trip in Mexico, and working intermittently on odd jobs.

The first of his stories to be printed were the first two parts of, The Red Pony in the North American Review of November and December 1933; the trip to Mexico was cancelled because of the pressure of writing; Steinbeck needed odd jobs until 1936-1937.

Steinbeck's third novel did make money, and did find an appreciative audience. Tortilla Flat was published in 1935, received an award, was produced as a play and was sold to the movies. True to his consistent pattern, Steinbeck in this book drew upon incidents he had observed-in this case episodes stemming from the lives of workers in the sugar-beet factory where he had worked years before. In the life of his paisanos, described in a mock-epic style, the novelist emphasizes values more or less subtly critical of middle-class morality. The characters lie, forgivably, steal, forgivably, and continually rationalize, forgivably, these traits, commonly defined as unworthy in a middle-class context, are not heinous in the setting of a rather tribal culture, the one presented here. Steinbeck does not so much support his characters' attitudes, poor diets and uncleanliness as he deplores the larger society's consuming and corrupting concern with property and the inimical values derived from owning property. Steinbeck suggests that the loyalty and spontaneity characteristic within his subcultural group cannot exist within the middle class American culture. Consistent with a good deal of later criticism of Steinbeck's work, Edmund Wilson, the influential critic, stated that the paisanos were such rudimentary creatures that they existed nearly on an animal level. Such statements, also invoked with reference to Of Mice and Men, can be neither easily refuted nor easily supported. For some critics, Steinbeck is a maudlin sentimentalist; for others he writes as a compassionate and tragic novelist.

In 1937, The Red Pony, a novelette in three parts, was published, one year after the strike novel, In Dubious Battle. While the novelette is a lyrical examination of a young boy's development, the strike novel, which received critical praise, is written in an objective, detached prose. Accusations of sentimentality find little direct support in this novel, for while the workers are depicted clearly as victims of others' machinations, the laborers themselves are no saints untouched by violence and meanness. Perhaps the most interesting philosophical aspect of In Dubious Battle involves the role played by an important character, Doc Burton, whose ideas closely parallel Steinbeck's later codifications in Sea of Cortez, alluded to above. In that 1941 book the novelist refers to his theory of "group-man," a concept very important to Steinbeck, who attributes to human groups an identity different from the mere sum of individual behavior traits. The novelist develops his theory on the basis of an analogy with the observed behavior of marine invertebrates, which seem to operate as a body for the satisfaction of certain primitive needs.

Of Mice And Men

This novel deals with ranch workers, two of whom are singled out for particular consideration. Lennie, huge, powerful and moronic, depends utterly on his comrade and guide George for protection and warmth. This novel, Steinbeck's first immediate and nation-wide success, nearly did not see the light of a publishing day. The novelist's setter pup ate up about half of the manuscript book, and no other draft existed. Steinbeck humorously suggested the poor dog might have been acting critically, and he merely gave the pup an ordinary spanking. It took months to rewrite the munched material. . . .

The Book-of-the-Month Club selected the novel in the year of publication, 1937; Of Mice and Men appeared on the bestseller lists; it was sold to Hollywood, where one producer absurdly suggested to the author that someone else commit the murder for which Lennie is responsible in the novel-in order to preserve the audience's sympathy for the poor brute! Finally independent, Steinbeck traveled to New York where he saw his agent, attended a dinner for Thomas Mann in a borrowed suit, and sailed to England. Then he visited the home of his mother's people in Ireland, and visited Sweden and Russia. When he returned to the United States, Steinbeck stayed at a Bucks County, Pennsylvania, farm belonging to George Kaufman, the famous musical comedy librettist. There, with some useful suggestions by Kaufman (who was to direct the play), the acting version was finished. It opened on November 23, 1937 at the Music Box Theater in New York to great applause; it elicited very favorable critical response, so much so that the play won the Drama Critics' Circle award in a season which also featured such famous plays as Our Town and Golden Boy. The citation awarded the play said:

The Grapes Of Wrath And After

Steinbeck had not waited to see the play produced. As soon as he finished the acting version, he set out for Oklahoma, where he joined a group of migrant workers. He lived with them in their shanties, and accompanied them to California, working all the way. He stated several times during this period that he had no preconceived or simplistic theories, social or economic, with which to confront the exploitation and forced mobility typical of the migrant laborers. He was with them to see, and to hear, and to experience. He hoped that the projection of his individual adventure onto a larger social pattern would not play him false. Steinbeck's intense sense of fellow-feeling and pity for the poverty and misery of his co-workers did not

lead to either sentimentalism or inappropriately "objective" stylization.

However, the novel fell into America's consciousness like a bomb, and that explosion left relatively little room for sober critical appraisal. The book was reviled; it was celebrated; it was damned for its inaccuracies, for giving an unfair and distorted picture of the United States to the world; it was scolded for not being a sufficiently stringent picture of deprivation, illness, and victimization. It was read; it was seen as a movie; it was debated on the radio. In short the novel had isolated a sore and vulnerable part of the American conscience. The coming of war in Europe at this time, 1939, merely increased Steinbeck's despairing sense that the short period of human civilizations had had no perceptible effect upon the animalistic violences implicit in man's oldest impulses.

In March of 1940 Steinbeck, in the company of his marine biologist friend, Edward Ricketts, traveled to the Gulf of California with the purpose of studying and classifying a number of marine invertebrates in the Gulf-also known as the Sea of Cortez, the old name and one which Steinbeck used as the title of the book. The importance of this work has been suggested above. In it, Steinbeck, the author of one of the two journals reproduced in Sea of Cortez, emphasizes the importance of a concept which he called "non-teleological thought." This term involves Steinbeck's attitude towards reality, which he feels should not be understood so much as a result of certain causal principles as it should be experienced in the immediate present, without an overlay of analytical considerations. Such considerations help to explain Steinbeck's obvious fondness for a whole series of fictional characters for whom dancing, singing and drinking now are more important and gratifying than grinding concern for tomorrow. The speculations in Sea of Cortez, however, lead to serious problems for Steinbeck's reader, who often can note puzzling discrepancies in both the structure and the depth of character portrayal in Steinbeck's works. The American involvement in World War II took place in the very month that Sea of Cortez was published. Steinbeck did what he could for the war effort. With Ricketts, he put together a list of scientific papers written by Japanese zoologists; these papers supplied information about tides and related matters which the novelist thought would be useful to the United States in the event of an invasion of the Japanese islands. Apparently these submissions were not acted upon. Peter Lisca, a critic who has most extensively written about Steinbeck, states that in addition to this effort, Steinbeck also suggested that counterfeit money be dropped behind enemy lines in order to cause inflation; it seems that President Roosevelt actually approved of this scheme, which was subsequently rejected by the Secretary of the Treasury. Steinbeck then wrote Bombs Away, a story about the Air Force's men and equipment; the novelist flew to a number of bases, accompanied by a photographer, in order to learn first-hand about the subject under investigation. In 1943 Steinbeck began a series of communiques from Europe and Africa for the New York Herald-Tribune. These pieces generally deal with individuals in the service, and their emotions, rather than with military analysis. During this period Steinbeck also published a novel of the Nazi occupation of Norway, The Moon is Down, which created vast excitement and drew both passionate apologists and angry accusations. The latter strongly underlined by their opinions that Steinbeck's portrayal of the Nazi occupiers of Norway insisted too much on their common humanity and glimpsed too little of the evil informing their attitudes. Although the King of Norway decorated Steinbeck for the book, present critics, now somewhat outside the heat of the war context, can identify the relative shallowness of the character portrayals, and the lack of imagination and conflict in the novel.

In December 1944, Cannery Row was published. A novel about individuals who in a middle-class situation would be seen as misfits and irresponsibles, it appears to praise even more positively than Tortilla Flat the day-to-day enjoyment of living in contrast to the usual social-climbing, gastric ulcered vaults of ambition. In addition, the novel features Doc, a character interestingly similar to Ed Ricketts, in whom are allied the virtues of the biological scientist's essential affectionate detachment and the common touch. In fact the resemblance between the character and Ricketts was so clear that Life magazine wanted to do a feature on the marine biologist; although he did not allow this article to be written, he and his laboratory did become a center of interest. In December of 1945 Woman's Home Companion printed a story called "The Pearl of the World," later named The Pearl. It is a story of a simple Indian man whose discovery of a priceless pearl triggers dishonesty and cupidity among the brokers, dissention in the home, fatality in the family. He wrote a number of novels after The Pearl, including The Wayward Bus and East of Eden, and, in the sixties, Travels with Charley, a journal kept by Steinbeck of his visits to some forty states with a companionable dog. Symptomatically, most of the "travels" take place outside the great urban centers of the United States, thus avoiding the almost overwhelming problems raised by the extraordinary growth and complexity of 20th century metropolitan reality. The book sold very well. Although Steinbeck's critical reputation was generally on the downgrade from the period of the second World War onward; and although his later work generally tends to depart from the themes he developed in the thirties, the Nobel Prize Committee awarded him the Prize for 1962. He had published The Winter of our Discontent the year before, but the great critical and journalistic consensus was that the Nobel Prize had been awarded to Steinbeck primarily in recognition, belated recognition, of such novels as The Grapes of Wrath, written so many years previously. The citation read: