The couple moved to New York City and had two sons, Thomas and two years later, John. In 1940, Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for Grapes of Wrath, bringing to public attention the plight of dispossessed farmers.Īfter Steinbeck and Henning divorced in 1942, he married Gwyndolyn Conger. Two years later, the novel was produced on Broadway and made into a movie. He felt encouraged to continue writing, relying on extensive research and personal observation of the human drama for his stories. With Tortilla Flat (1935), Steinbeck's career took a decidedly positive turn, receiving the California Commonwealth Club's Gold Medal. Here, not far from famed Cannery Row, heart of the California sardine industry, Steinbeck found material he would later use for two more works, Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row. Two subsequent novels, The Pastures of Heaven and To A God Unknown, met the same fate.Īfter moving to the Monterey Peninsula in 1930, Steinbeck and his new wife, Carol Henning, made their home in Pacific Grove. Though his first novel, Cup of Gold, was published in 1929, it attracted little literary attention. He was unsuccessful and returned, disappointed, to California the following year. Steinbeck left Stanford permanently in 1925 to pursue a career in writing in New York City. During this time he attended only sporadically while working at a variety jobs including on with the Big Sur highway project, and one at Spreckels Sugar Company near Salinas.
Stanford did not claim his undivided attention. In 1919, he graduated from Salinas High School as president of his class and entered Stanford University majoring in English. Young Steinbeck came to know the Salinas Valley well, working as a hired hand on nearby ranches in Monterey County.
His mother, Olive Hamilton, was a former schoolteacher who developed in him a love of literature. His father, John Steinbeck, served as Monterey County Treasurer for many years. John Ernst Steinbeck, Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner, was born in Salinas, California February 27, 1902. Awards-Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, 1940.Education-Studied marine biology at Stanford University,.Then one day, in a moment of moral crisis, Ethan decides to take a holiday from his own scrupulous standards. With the decline in their status, his wife is restless, and his teenage children are hungry for the tantalizing material comforts he cannot provide.
In awarding John Steinbeck the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel committee stated that with The Winter of Our Discontent, he had "resumed his position as an independent expounder of the truth, with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American."Įthan Allen Hawley, the protagonist of the novel, works as a clerk in a grocery store that his family once owned.
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