John Ernest Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California, on February 27, 1902 of German and Irish ancestry. His father, John Steinbeck, Sr, served as the Country Treasurer whiles his mother, Olive, a former school teacher, fostered Steinbeck's love of reading and the written word. During summers he worked as a hired hand near ranches.
After graduating from Salinas High School in 1919, Steinbeck attended Stanford University.
During this time he worked periodically at various jobs and left Stanford permanently in 1925 to pursue his writing career in New York. However, he was unsuccessful in getting any of his writing published and finally returned to California.
His first book, Cup of Gold, was written when his was a watchman of a house in the High Sierra and was published in 1929, but attracted little attention. His two subsequent novels, The Pasture of Heaven and To a God Unknown, were also poorly received by the literary world.
CALIFORNIA 1941-44 LICENSE PLATE WITH TABS
English: John Steinbeck
132 Central Avenue, Salinas, California, the home ...Steinbeck married his first wife, Carol Henning in 1930. They lived in Pacific Grove where much of the material for Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row was gathered. Tortilla Flat (1935) marked the turning point in Steinbeck's literary career. It received the California Commonwealth Club's Gold Medal for best novel by a California author, Steinbeck continued writing, relying upon extensive research and his personal observation of the human condition for his stories. The Grapes of Wrath (1939) won the Pulitzer Prize.
During World War II, Steinbeck was a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. Some of his dispatches were later collected and made into Once There Was a War.
John Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962 "...for his realistic as well as imaginative writings, distinguished by a sympathetic humor and a keen social perception.
Throughout his life John Steinbeck...