John Ernst Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California, on February 27, 1902. His father, John Steinbeck, Sr. was the County Treasurer and his mother, Olive Hamilton Steinbeck, was a former school teacher. As a youth, he worked as a ranch hand and fruit picker.
             Steinbeck attended Salinas High School, and after graduating in 1919 Steinbeck attended Stanford University intermittently from 1920 to 1925. Originally an English major, he pursued a program of independent study and his attendance was sporadic. During this time he worked periodically at various jobs and left Stanford permanently 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 novel, Cup of Gold, was published in 1929, but attracted little attention. His two subsequent novels, The Pastures of Heaven and To a God Unknown, were also poorly received. Steinbeck married his first wife, Carol Henning in 1930 and moved to the Pacific Grove. He published Tortilla Flat in 1935. This 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. His next novel, in Dubious Battle (1936), remains as one of the best strike novels in the English language. In 1937 he came out with Of Mice and Men, a tragic story of two itinerant farm laborers yearning for a small farm of their own. In 1939 he came out with his masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath. It won the Pulitzer Prize, and was made into a notable movie.
             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. He also wrote some effective pieces of propaganda such as The Moon is Down (1942), a novel of ...