Of Mice and Men (Author Biography)

Author Biography

John Ernst Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California. He was the third of four children — and only son — of John Ernst, Sr., and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck. Steinbeck's father managed a flour mill and later served as treasurer of Monterey County. His mother had taught in a one-room rural school. At the turn of the century, Salinas was a typical American small town. Located about one hundred miles south of San Francisco, near Monterey Bay, Salinas at the time had a population of three thousand. Steinbeck's father was a good provider, although the family was not affluent. Young John had to work to earn his own money. During high school, he worked on nearby ranches during the summer. In high school, he earned mostly B's and B-pluses and, in his senior year, he was elected president of the class. He was also an associate editor of the school newspaper, although his articles showed none of the brilliance of his later work. In 1919, Steinbeck entered Stanford University in Palo Alto, about eighty miles north of Salinas. He made only average grades there, and after two years he withdrew from the university. During the following two years, he worked on a ranch south of Salinas before returning to Stanford. He attended classes off and on, sometimes suspending his studies because of illness and his indecision about what field of study to pursue. When not at school, he worked several different jobs, including one as a clerk in Oakland and as a laborer in the beet and barley fields of Salinas, an experience that he would write about fifteen years later in Of Mice and Men.

Steinbeck then returned to Salinas, lived at home, worked as a bench chemist at Spreckel's Sugar Company, and spent his free time writing. In January 1923, Steinbeck returned to Stanford University, where during the next three years he was a diligent student and received A's and B's. Two of his stories appeared in The Stanford Spectator. After five years of sporadic study, Steinbeck left Stanford in 1925 without a degree or prospects for a job. He was twenty-three. He made his first trip to New York City by freighter, hoping to establish himself as a writer. In New York he worked as a reporter for the now-defunct New York American. He was soon fired when his writing was judged too subjective for newspaper reporting. After his manuscript for a book of short stories was rejected, Steinbeck returned to California as a deck hand on a freighter and soon after worked as a caretaker for a lodge in the Sierras near Lake Tahoe in Nevada.

In 1930 Steinbeck married Carol Henning. She gave up a career in advertising to work as a typist, secretary, and copyreader so that her husband could write steadily. In 1931, some ten million Americans were out of work. Soup kitchen lines and closed stores were common sights across the country. The Steinbecks, however, were not desperate. Carol earned a small income, and Steinbeck's father allowed them to live in a rent-free cottage and gave his son twenty-five dollars per month. The Steinbecks and their friends discussed current events, including President Franklin Roosevelt's policies, signs of labor unrest in California, and the great number of unemployed Americans. Some of the Steinbecks' friends in the Monterey-Pacific Grove area were active in labor politics.

In 1936, Steinbeck began work on Of Mice and Men. Based on his ranch experiences and his firsthand knowledge of migrant workers, the novel was to be a realistic parable of farming conditions in Salinas Valley. Beginning with this novel, the works that would make him famous during the years just prior to World War II were concerned mostly with the dispossessed and farm laborers. Yet Steinbeck did not see the migrants in political terms. Although he had great concern for the plight of migrant workers, he saw himself as an artist creating works that would have universal meaning and, as art, would stand the test of time. A kind and compassionate man by nature, Steinbeck's concern for people in trouble shows clearly in his work.

Shortly after Of Mice and Men was published, Steinbeck worked with playwright George Kaufman on the stage version of the novel. The night the play opened on Broadway, Steinbeck was living in a migrant camp, researching and working on the early version of the novel that was to be transformed into The Grapes of Wrath the following year. He never saw the Broadway play of this powerful work. In 1943, Steinbeck divorced his first wife, marrying singer, writer, and composer Gwyndolyn Conger that same year. He and Gwyndolyn had two sons, Tom and John, before they divorced in 1948. Steinbeck married his third wife, Elaine Scott, in 1950.

Steinbeck's many honors during his lifetime included the U.S. Medal of Freedom and the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1962 Steinbeck became only the sixth American to receive the Nobel Prize. Steinbeck was elated and surprised to receive this honor, the greatest any writer can receive. His fiction of the 1930s gained national recognition, and Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath won acclaim in other countries as well. On December 20, 1968, after a series of strokes, Steinbeck died in his apartment in New York City. His ashes were buried in the family cemetery in Salinas.