TB3+John+Steinbeck

Nick Dieter =Early Life= John Steinbeck Jr. was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California. His books, including his landmark work //The Grapes of Wrath//, often dealt with social and economic issues. Steinbeck was raised with modest means. His father, John Ernst Steinbeck, tried his hand at several different jobs to keep his family fed. He decided to become a writer at the age of 14, often locking himself in his bedroom to write poems and stories. In 1919, Steinbeck enrolled at Stanford University but over the next six years, he eventually dropped out for good in 1925, without a degree.

=Early Career= Following Stanford, Steinbeck tried to make a go of it as a freelance writer. He moved to New York City, where he worked as a construction worker and a newspaper reporter. He soon moved back to California and took a job as a caretaker in Lake Tahoe. He then wrote his first novel, //Cup of Gold//, and married his first wife Carol Henning. Steinbeck's follow-up novels, //The Pastures of Heaven// and //To a God Unknown// received uninterested reviews. It wasn't until //Tortilla Flat//, a novel about paisano life in the Monterey region, was released that he achieved success. Steinbeck's finest and most ambitious novel, //The Grapes of Wrath, t//elling the story of a dispossessed Oklahoma family and their struggle to carve out a new life in California at the height of the Great Depression. The work eventually earned Steinbeck a Pulitzer Prize in 1940.

=Later Life= Following that great success, John Steinbeck served as a war correspondent for the //New York Herald Tribune// during World War II. He also traveled to Mexico to collect marine life with friend Edward F. Ricketts, a marine biologist. Their collaboration resulted in the book //Sea of Cortez.// Steinbeck continued to write in his later years. In 1962, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature—"for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception". Steinbeck died of heart disease on December 20, 1968, at his home in New York City. media type="custom" key="25901644"

"John Ernst Steinbeck Jr." //Bio//. A&E Television Networks, 2014. Web. 13 May 2014.