Life and works of John Steinnbeck Essay - 2399 Words

John Steinbeck was probably the best author of all time. He was the winner of a Nobel Prize, and along with many other accomplishments, Steinbeck wrote twenty-five books, including sixteen novels, six non-fiction books and several collections of short stories during his lifetime. Seventeen of his works, including The Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row, The Pearl, and East of Eden, went on to become Hollywood films, some appeared multiple times, as remakes. Steinbeck also had some success as a Hollywood writer, receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Story in 1944 for Alfred Hitchcocks Lifeboat. Many of his life experiences are shown through his novels. Someone can tell, by reading one of Steinbeck’s novels that he had been through a lot,†¦show more content†¦Also during the time he spent outdoors, he began farming in the Salinas Valley. Mostly Salinas Valley was built up by farmers that came after original settlers had arrived. John Ernest Steinbeck was born in Salinas Valley, on February 27, 1902 from German and Irish decent. His father was the county’s treasurer and his mother who was a school teacher nurtured John’s ability to read and write. In 1919 Steinbeck graduated from Salinas High School and later attended Stanford University. Originally an English major, he pursued a program of independent study. During this time at the University he worked at various jobs and left Stanford permanently in 1925, without a degree, in order to pursue his writing career in New York. He failed at getting any of his writing published and then returned back to California, as a resort handyman in Lake Tahoe. His first novel, Cup of Gold, about the pirate Henry Morgan who had captured Steinbecks imagination as a child, was finally published in 1929, but received little attention. His two following novels, The Pastures of Heaven and To a God Unknown, were also somewhat unnoticed by the literary world. In 1930 Steinbeck married his first wife Carol Henning. They both lived in Pacific Grove where a large amount of the material was influenced for Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row. Tortilla Flat, published in 1935 marked the turning point in Steinbecks career. For Tortilla Flat, Steinbeck received the California Commonwealth Clubs Gold Medal