John Steinbeck
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John Steinbeck - St. Mark's Library Catalog Holdings
BIOGRAPHY
John Ernst Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California, on February 27, 1902 of German and Irish ancestry. His father, John Steinbeck, Sr., served as the County Treasurer while his mother, Olive (Hamilton) Steinbeck, a former school teacher, fostered Steinbeck's love of reading and the written word. During summers he worked as a hired hand on nearby ranches, nourishing his impression of the California countryside and its people. After graduating from Salinas High School in 1919, Steinbeck attended Stanford University. 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 in 1925 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 by the literary world. Steinbeck married his first wife, Carol Henning in 1930. They lived in Pacific Grove where much of the material for Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row was gathered. Tortilla Flat (1935) 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. The Grapes of Wrath (1939) won the Pulitzer Prize.
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. John Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962 “...for his realistic as well as imaginative writings, distinguished by a sympathetic humor and a keen social perception.” Throughout his life John Steinbeck remained a private person who shunned publicity. He died December 20, 1968, in New York City and is survived by his third wife, Elaine (Scott) Steinbeck and one son, Thomas. His ashes were placed in the Garden of Memories Cemetery in Salinas.
EAST OF EDEN
BACKGROUND
John Steinbeck's East of Eden was published for the first time by Viking Press in September 1952, ten years before the writer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and has never been out of print since. In November 1952 East of Eden was number one on the fiction best-seller list. In A Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letter, the writer's diary of East of Eden, Steinbeck calls the novel “...the story of my country and the story of me.” The book spans the history of the nation from the Civil War to World War I and tells the story of two American families, The Hamiltons, Steinbeck's matenal relatives, are the “Universal Family” and the fictional Trasks are the “Universal Neighbors.” Steinbeck's inspiration for the novel comes from the Bible, the fourth chapter of the book of Genesis, verses one though sixteen, which recounts the story of Cain and Abel. The title, East of Eden, was chosen by Steinbeck from Genesis, Chapter 4, verse 16.
The novel was originally addressed to Steinbeck's young sons, Thom and John IV (then 6 1/2 and 4 1/2 respectively). Steinbeck wanted to describe the Salinas Valley for them in detail: the sights, sounds, smells, and colors. Steinbeck called East of Eden “a sort of autobiography of the Salinas Valley.” East of Eden begins in 1862 and covers three generations and 56 years. The book ends in salinas, California, in 1918. The theme of East of Eden: “All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil.” Steinbeck called this book “The big one as far as I'm concerned. Always before I held something back for later. Nothing is held back here.” East of Eden is an allegorical/realistic novel, a daring combination of biography and fiction.
Steinbeck returned to Salinas in February of 1948 to begin intensive research for what he considered would be his greatest book, East of Eden. During his stay in Monterey, he drove to Salinas and used the files of the local newspaper, the Salinas Index-Journal. The novel was completed in November of 1951. The work on East of Eden followed two blows, the death of Edward Ricketts, Steinbeck's best friend, known as “Doc” in his Cannery Row books, and the separation and divorce from his second wife, Gwyn. Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters, the posthumously published series of letters to Pascal Covici that accompanied the text of East of Eden, was published in 1969.
WRITING
The book was written in part in New York City in a four-story brownstone house on Seventy Second Street. Steinbeck had an upstairs room for writing. The Steinbecks rented a Victorian two-story family beach house in Siasconset on Nantucket Island where the writer spent several months working on his novel. The original manuscript of East of Eden is in the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, Texas. Steinbeck kept track of things while writing East of Eden, and this is the record:
• Eleven years of mental gestation
• One year of uninterrupted writing
• 25 dozen pencils
• Approximately three dozen reams of paper
• 350,000 words (before cutting)
• About 75,000 words in his work-in-progress journal
• And a rock-hard callus on the middle finger of the writer's right hand.
Steinbeck's widow, Elaine, in looking back on the year that he worked on the book, said that his work on the novel affected him deeply. Perhaps the best way to put it would be to say that it was the last stage in putting himself back together after the years that had torn him apart. As Steinbeck progressed through the early chapters, he noted that his voice would be more apparent in this book than in any other because he wanted it to contain everything he remembered to be true. He would be in this one and not “for one moment pretend not to be.”
Steinbeck states about East of Eden, “It has everything in it I have been able to learn about my craft or profession in all these years.” He further claimed, “I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this.” East of Eden became a best seller so it was a natural for the movies. East of Eden, the film, was directed and produced by Elia Kazan and starred James Dean as “Cal.” The film opens at approximately Chapter 37 in Part Four of the novel. The film, shot in part in Salinas, California, was finished and released in 1955. The film has now reached the stature of a classic.
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Reference
Brown, Mary Ellen and Bruce A. Rosenberg, eds. Encyclopedia of Folklore and Literature. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1998. REF 803 ENC
Cuddon, J.A., ed. A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. 4th ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. REF 803 CUD
Kemp, Peter, ed. The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. REF 808.882 OXF
Lass, Abraham H., David Kiremidjian and Ruth M. Goldstein, The Facts On File Dictionary of Classical, Biblical, and Literary Allusions. New York: Facts on File, 1987. REF 803 LAS.
Lazzari, Marie, ed. Epics for Students. Detroit: Gale, 1997. REF 809.132 EPI
Magill, Frank N., ed. Cyclopedia of Literary Characters. New York: Harper & Row, 1963. REF 803 CYC
Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature, Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 1995. REF 803 MER
Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia. 4th ed. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. REF 803 BEN
Quinn, Edward, A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms. New York: Facts on File, 1999. REF 803 QUI
Webber, Elizabeth and Mike Feinsilber, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of Allusions. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 1999. REF 803 WEB
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