 |
"The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is
charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures,
with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams
for the purpose of improvement."
-- Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech 1962
|
|
|
|
|
| John
Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California in 1902 and grew up about
twenty-five miles form the Pacific Coast, in a fertile valley that
would come to be the setting for many of his most famous novels. In
1919, Steinbeck attended Stanford University, enrolling in literature
and writing courses and left there in 1925 sans degree. Over the next
five years, he supported himself in New York City as a laborer and
journalist and as a caretaker for a Lake Tahoe estate. After marrying,
he and his wife relocated to Pacific Grove, California, where he published
two novels. As the forties rolled in, Steinbeck became a filmmaker
and a student of marine biology as he worked on his novel Sea of
Cortez. Steinbeck married two more times and spent the last decades
of his life with his third wife in New York City and Sag Harbor. The
couple were frequent travelers. In 1968, John Steinbeck passed away,
leaving behind an accomplished literary legacy that earned him a Nobel
Prize for Literature six years earlier. |
|
|
