Website review: John Ernst Steinbeck Biography | En...
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AlokeKumar discovered 3 months ago- JOHN ERNST STEINBECK 1902-1968 American author and winner of the Nobel Prize in 1962, was a leading exponent of the proletarian novel and a prominent spokesman for the victims of the Great Depression. John Steinbeck was born on Feb. 27, 1902, in Salinas, California, the son of a small-town politician and school-teacher. He worked as a laboratory assistant and farm laborer to support himself through 6 years of study at Stanford University, where he took only those courses that interested him, without seeking a degree. In 1925 he traveled to New York on a freighter, collecting impressions for his first novel. Cup of Gold (1929) which was an unsuccessful attempt at psychological romance involving the pirate Henry Morgan. Steinbeck felt both empathy for the weak and scorn for the middle-class complacency of his hometown. At fourteen, he decided to write romances, but after a long apprenticeship, he found his voice in more realistic stories about ordinary people trying to achieve dignity in a repressive society. His short stories of the early 1930s, collected in The Long Valley (1938), tell of the misplaced, the lonely, and the misunderstood, their frustration conveyed in prose that, like Hemingway's, is terse and suggestive. The rollicking Tortilla Flat (1935), his first commercial success, relates the misadventures of a group of drunken, finagling paisanos whose uninhibited zest for life and loyalty to one another are contrasted favorably with bourgeois sensibilities, a theme and tone he later adopted when he wrote about Monterey's Cannery Row (1945). Steinbeck's symbolic realism and sociopolitical convictions achieve their fullest expression, however, in his masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath. This saga of the Joad family--"tractored out" of Oklahoma, exiled to California, and oppressed as migrant laborers--focused national attention on the plight of the homeless. The popularity of the book and of John Ford's classic film version brought Steinbeck the fame that, in fact, he scarcely relished. In 1941 he and marine biologist Edward Ricketts published Sea of Cortez, an account of their expedition cataloging marine life and a philosophical record of their ecological perspective. Steinbeck's Steinbeck's Sea of Cortez and Cannery Row give full expression to this ecological and holistic awareness. Steinbeck's shift from politics to biology was but an occasion of his constant experimentation with genres. In the 1940s and 1950s he composed screenplays, a musical, journalistic pieces, travel narratives, fables, an epic, and play/novelettes. Whereas the symbolic play/novelette Burning Bright (1950) was a critical failure, the tight fable The Pearl (1947) occupies a high place in his canon. Undoubtedly his most impressive fictional experiment after Grapes, however, is East of Eden. Its importance lies in Steinbeck's efforts to come to terms with individual ethical responsibility rather than social dynamics. For his work, The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. This spot is for Liz who likes the writings of John Steinbeck. For more on her visit : http://altervistas.stumbleupon.com/
