John Steinbeck: Reflection in American Literature The literary contributions of John Steinbeck have had a profound effect on literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Born February 27, 1902, John Steinbeck, like many of his fictional characters, grew up in Salinas, California. He studied writing intermittently at Stanford but never graduated. Instead, Steinbeck moved to New York where he worked as a manual laborer and journalist while writing his first two novels. He married in 1930 and moved back to California with his wife. There, his father, a government official in Salinas County, gave the couple a house to live in while Steinbeck continued writing (Bowmen 167). Steinbeck won a Pulitzer Prize in 1939, the Nobel Prize in literature in 1962, and the United States Medal of Freedom in 1964 before he passed away in 1968 (Bowmen 169). Many aspects of Steinbeck's writing can be directly linked to his personal life through the style, themes, and characters presented in his works.
English: John Steinbeck
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132 Central Avenue, Salinas, California, the home ...Steinbeck's childhood experiences have made him very aware of the "weaknesses, frustrations, failures, and grotesqueries"� of humans (Steinbeck, Short Novels 109). As a child, Steinbeck experienced problems at home, which are reflected in his writing. Steinbeck once wrote of his father, "He was not particularly gifted as a parent. He could be very self-centered, abusive, and dysfunctional when it came to raising children. So the kid has to raise himself. Dad never had to be a parent except on his time and on his terms, and then he was very good at that, very good. Had he had to do it day in and day out, he would have failed miserably"� (Steinbeck, Short Novels 106).
Steinbeck never understood the reasons behind his family's problems until much later. For this reason, he claimed his writing was aimed at helping people...