Steinbeck had many close friends who shared this similar trait, this love of truth in art and expression--the list includes Ed Ricketts, Bo Beskow, and Budd Shulberg. The s were a time of unrest both for Steinbeck and the United States economy.
Until the publication and surprising success of Tortilla Flat in , Steinbeck was searching for his audience and niche as a writer. However, made aware of the injustices done to migrants as a result of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, Steinbeck found himself immersed in a project that would test his abilities as a journalist and challenge his tenacity as an American man.
He enjoyed the companionship and guidance of Tom Collins , manager of the Arvin camp for migrant laborers in Kern County. Collins was the inspiration for the Grapes of Wrath relief-camp manager Jim Rawley.
Collins was a notoriously hard worker, which Steinbeck admired. As a team, they not only documented injustices but caused physical change in the migrant camps. Benson suggests that the relationship between Collins and Steinbeck was not unlike that of Ricketts and Steinbeck.
Such were the men Steinbeck chose to surround himself with. Such were the men who made him feel most inspired. Though not necessarily a close friend, Steinbeck also found great inspiration in documentary filmmaker Pare Lorentz. Steinbeck first met Lorentz in through mutual acquaintances studying and photographing Dust Bowl migrants. Steinbeck was married three times. He met his first wife, Carol Henning , while he was serving as caretaker for a property in Lake Tahoe during the late s.
With Carol, a woman of quips and asides, curiosity and intelligence, he most certainly found words--they talked nonstop.
Carol was a catalyst for John, essential to his creativity. At this time in his life, Steinbeck craved participation, finding inspiration for his writing in discussion with his friends Shillinglaw To Tom [Collins], who lived it. Steinbeck found Gwyn Conger , his second wife and the mother of his children, during a separation from Carol after a fight.
He and Gwyn married, had two sons, then divorced in It is an old story of female frustration. With his third and final wife, Elaine Scott , Steinbeck finally found peace. Elaine accompanied him to England, where they lived in Somerset while Steinbeck worked on his Arthurian research.
She supported the cross-country journey that resulted in his travel journal Travels with Charley in Search of America, a necessary proclamation of masculinity during a time when Steinbeck felt truly weakened by age and illness.
She helped him find comfort on the East Coast in the purchase of the Sag Harbor home. But perhaps most importantly, she guided him through some of the most difficult times of his life: his divorce and dealings with Gwyn, the raising of his children, his journalistic efforts during the Vietnam War, and finally the slow decline of his health.
In Elaine, Steinbeck rejoiced to find the sense of comfort, stability, and strength that he searched for in his previous two marriages. While Steinbeck never truly felt at home with many of his upper-class, tinsel-town acquaintances, there were some with whom he developed a strong connection. Loesser is most famous for writing the music and lyrics to Guys and Dolls. Frank Loesser, who had always been a special friend, was a frequent visitor. He talked while he walked, and he walked all the time, with his hands stuffed into his back pockets, and told his stories all over the room.
For John, to be with Frank was like a tonic, a sudden injection of life and laughter, and on one occasion, John was in his dressing gown sitting in the living room, when Frank went in to see him. At once they were in a world of their own, and it was as if nothing had changed. Unfortunately, despite his gratitude, Steinbeck did not attend any of the New York performances of his successful new show--a slight that Kaufman felt personally and deeply as time passed, especially considering that throughout the production process he found Steinbeck somewhat disengaged Benson Years later, however, in , Steinbeck acknowledged the minimal amount of work he put into the production of Of Mice and Men, and gave full credit for its success to George S.
Kaufman Benson Benson wrote of their personal relationship:. He was not what he appeared to be, a great strong guy, but he was also a strong man—both. Unsurprisingly , since so many of his texts feature strong political undertones, Steinbeck admired and made the acquaintance of a number of influential politicians.
However, the politician Steinbeck admired most was Adlai Stevenson. Steinbeck supported Stevenson during each of his runs, and the two became close friends. However, immediately after the assassination of President Kennedy, Steinbeck wrote to Jacqueline Kennedy to express his condolences. This letter initiated a correspondence between the two that led to Mrs. Despite spending significant time planning, he did not write the book. Rather, he explained to Mrs.
Though her period of correspondence with Steinbeck was brief, Mrs. Johnson became President of the United States. As such, it fell to him to present Steinbeck with the Medal of Freedom that Kennedy had intended for Steinbeck.
This presentation initiated a lasting friendship and loyalty between the two men, and rekindled an old friendship between Ladybird Johnson and Elaine both attended the University of Texas Benson It was this mutual loyalty and respect that led Johnson to ask Steinbeck to go to Vietnam.
Steinbeck witnessed and experienced violent combat and hardship, and his observations in Vietnam solidified his distaste for the war. However, his loyalty to his party, his children both sons fought in Vietnam , and his president led him to keep his wartime experiences and opinions quiet for the remainder of his life Barden xvi.
While Steinbeck repeatedly proclaimed that writing was a lonely and personal process, he relied very heavily on the support of his editors, publishers, and agents. Ballou of Cape and Smith. Only when young Steinbeck was in college did the family fortunes stabilize and Mr.
Steinbeck became Monterey county treasurer. When he was four, Steinbeck was given his own pony, Jill, an inspiration for his later series of stories, The Red Pony.
John was a reader. Some twenty years later, Steinbeck would adopt Arthurian tropes and chapter headings in his novel Tortilla Flat. In the late s he and his third wife, Elaine, traveled to England and Wales to research Arthurian legends in preparation for a modernized text of the Arthurian tales.
In early adolescence, John Steinbeck showed a strong interest in writing. I was scared to death to get a rejection slip, but more, to get an acceptance. Steinbeck wrote for his high school newspaper. By age 14, he knew he wanted to be a writer and never abandoned that calling.
In , Steinbeck enrolled at Stanford University, hoping to sharpen his writing skills. He took creative writing courses and relished courses in world history. In Steinbeck briefly lived in New York City, attempting to support himself as a manual laborer and journalist. I was scared thoroughly. There, working long hours during the freezing winters, he finished his first novel, Cup of Gold , a critically and commercially unsuccessful tale based on the life of the privateer Henry Morgan.
There he also met the woman who would become his first wife, Carol Henning. And she was devoted to his writing. He followed her to San Francisco and then the two moved to Los Angeles, where they married on January 14, In the little Pacific Grove house, Steinbeck continued to write feverishly while Carol worked at various jobs. When the friend abandoned the story line, Steinbeck took it up and wrote and rewrote for over four years, shifting the setting to the San Antonio Valley, near King City, where Steinbeck spent some time as a teenager.
This powerful, evocative novel was eventually published in In , Steinbeck enjoyed his first critical and commercial success with the novella Tortilla Flat , a book that chronicles the adventures of Monterey paisanos. The Arthurian tales were his model. In , the novella was adapted as a film starring Spencer Tracy and Hedy Lamarr. The first began as a biography of a strike organizer; Steinbeck ended up writing a novel, however, a searing account of a strike in a California apple orchard.
Workers and farmers are pitted against one another, with the communist organizers ruthlessly exploiting the conflict. The text of Mice , he hoped, would also be the script for a play—an experiment that failed when it was performed in San Francisco shortly after the book was published. The two friends depend on one another in a world where most working men are lonely, moving from job to job.
Steinbeck called his book a little study in humility—it went on to become one of his most beloved books. Its roots are journalistic. In the fall of , he was asked by the San Francisco News , a liberal publication, to investigate conditions in migrant labor camps near Bakersfield, California. He also describes life in a federal government camp, where workers were given decent housing and running water. Both his wrath and his optimism are woven into The Grapes of Wrath , a book that he researched for nearly two years after his first investigative trip to the Central Valley.
There are about five thousand families starving to death over there…The states and counties will give them nothing because they are outsiders. In a camper truck designed to his specification, he toured America in His disenchantment with American waste, greed, and immorality ran deep. His last published book, America and Americans , reconsiders the American character, the land, the racial crisis, and the crumbling will.
In these late years, in fact after his final move to New York in , many accused him of increasing conservatism. But the author who wrote The Grapes of Wrath never really retreated into conservatism. He lived in modest houses all his life, caring little for lavish displays of power or wealth. He preferred talking to ordinary citizens wherever he traveled, sympathizing always with the disenfranchised.
He was a Stevenson Democrat in the s; he was never a communist in the s, and after three trips to Russia , , and he hated Soviet repression.
In fact, neither during his life nor after has the paradoxical Steinbeck been an easy author to pigeonhole personally, politically, or artistically. As a man, he was an introvert and at the same time had a romantic streak, was impulsive, garrulous, a lover of jests and word play and practical jokes. He loved humor and warmth, but some said he slopped over into sentimentalism. He was, and is now recognized as, an environmental writer.
He was an intellectual, interested in inventions, jazz, politics, philosophies, history, and myth, quite a range for an author sometimes labeled simplistic by academe and the eastern critical establishment. Steinbeck died in New York City. His popularity spans the world, his range is impressive, and his output was prodigious: sixteen novels; a collection of short stories; four screenplays The Forgotten Village , The Red Pony , The Pearl , and Viva Zapata!
Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love. Essential biographical sources are also Steinbeck: A Life in Letters , ed. Florian J. Shasky and Susan F. Riggs The most complete bibliography of primary works is Adrian H.
Goldstone and John R. Joseph R. McElrath, Jesse S. Crisler, and Susan Shillinglaw Susan Beegel, Shillinglaw, and Wes Tiffney See Joseph R. Millichap, Steinbeck and Film , for a solid introduction to the subject. An excellent collection of essays is Jackson J.
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