He didn't know it at the time, but John Steinbeck started getting ready to write The Grapes of Wrath when he was a small boy in California. Much of what he saw and heard while growing up found its way into the novel. On weekends his father took John and his three sisters on long drives out into the broad and beautiful valleys south of Salinas, the town where John was born in 1902. John passed vast orchards, and endless fields green with lettuce and barley. He observed the workers and the run-down shacks in which they lived. And he saw, even before he was old enough to wear long pants, that the farmhands' lives differed from his own.
Although the Steinbecks weren't wealthy (John's father ran a flour mill), they lived in a comfortable Victorian house. John grew up on three square meals a day. He never doubted that he would always have enough of life's necessities.
English: John Steinbeck
Trailer for the 1940 black and white film The Grap...
To reach California the Joads travel U.S. Highway ...He even got a pony for his 12th birthday. (The pony became the subject of one of Steinbeck's earliest successes, his novel The Red Pony.) But don't think John was pampered; his family expected him to work. He delivered newspapers and did odd jobs around town.
Family came first in the Steinbeck household. While not everyone saw eye-to-eye all the time, parents and children got along well. His father saw that John had talent and encouraged him to become a writer. His mother at first wanted John to be a banker--a real irony when you consider what Steinbeck says about banks in The Grapes of Wrath--but she changed her mind when John began spending hours in his room scrawling stories and writing articles for the school paper. Later in life, Steinbeck denied that his family served as a model for the Joads...