John Steinbeck
Novelist, Nobel Prize in Literature 1962
Born 1902 · Died 1968
Photo: McFadden Publications, Inc.; no photographer credited; photo likely the work of · Public domain
«I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession.»
John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men and East of Eden, novels of Depression-era California that won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and the Nobel Prize in 1962. He remains one of the most widely read American authors and a fixture on school syllabuses around the world.
Key achievements
- Nobel Prize in Literature, 1962
- Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath, 1940
- Wrote Of Mice and Men and East of Eden
Universities
Stanford, California (next to Palo Alto)
Attended intermittently from 1919 to 1925, taking English and marine biology courses, and left without a degree.
Facts
- He drifted in and out of Stanford for six years, working on ranches and at a sugar factory between terms, and left in 1925 without a degree to try his luck as a writer in New York.
- A summer course at Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station fed a lifelong interest in marine biology that led to his friendship with Ed Ricketts and the book Sea of Cortez.
- The Grapes of Wrath (1939) was the best-selling book of its year in the United States and was publicly burned and banned in Kern County, California, where much of it is set.
- He wrote East of Eden in 1951 in 276 days and told his editor that everything else he had written was, in a sense, practice for it.
Photographs
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences; the author and licence are shown on each image.