John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck was an American writer.
He was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California, into the family of a county administrator. Steinbeck had Irish and German roots. He lived in a small rural town that was essentially a frontier settlement, located amid some of the most fertile land. He spent his summers working on nearby ranches and later with migrant workers on the Spreckels ranch. He explored the county, its forests, fields, and farms.
In 1919, Steinbeck graduated from high school and entered Stanford University, where he studied intermittently until 1925, when he eventually dropped out without completing his degree. He went to New York, living on odd jobs while pursuing his dream of becoming a writer. When his work was not published, he returned to California and worked for a time as a guide and caretaker at a fish hatchery in Tahoe City, where he met Carol Henning, his future first wife. Steinbeck and Henning married in January 1930. They lived in a cottage owned by his father. The elder Steinbeck provided John with free lodging and paper for his manuscripts, allowing Steinbeck to focus on his craft.
After the publication of the novel Tortilla Flat in 1935, the Steinbecks emerged from relative poverty and built a summer house in Los Gatos. In 1940, Steinbeck traveled around the Gulf of California with his influential friends to collect biological specimens. The Log from the Sea of Cortez describes this trip. In March 1943, after Steinbeck and Carol divorced, he married Gwyn Conger. Steinbeck’s only children, Thomas Miles (1944) and John (1946–1991), were from his second marriage.
In 1943, Steinbeck participated in World War II as a war correspondent. In 1944, he was wounded by an ammunition explosion in North Africa, and, exhausted by the war, he resigned and returned home.
In 1947, Steinbeck made his first trip to the USSR. He visited Moscow, Kyiv, Tbilisi, Batumi, and Stalingrad, becoming one of the first Westerners to visit many parts of the USSR since the communist revolution. In 1948, Steinbeck was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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