Steinbeck’s World

Photos from the Steinbeck Museum

Steinbeck’s Family

  • well-balanced, not too rich or too poor
  • Steinbeck married 3 times
    • Elaine Scott - Broadway stage manager
    • Carol Henning - edited and typed his manuscripts
    • Gwyndolyn Conger - 2 sons, professional singer

Orientation Video

  • “In America, writers are considered just above acrobats and right below seals.”
  • born in Salinas Valley
  • mother, a teacher, instilled reading/writing abilities
  • went to Stanford - left in 1925 without a degree
  • labored à hard/dirty work
  • Ed Rickett & Steinbeck became good friends at Cannery Row, Monterey
  • Tortilla Flat - filmàmoney
  • Of Mice and Men - broadway hit
  • JS discovered “harvest gypsies” in a newspaper
    • Grapes of Wrath won Pulitzer Prize
      • J Edgar Hoover considered John Steinbeck dangerous b/c of Grapes of Wrath
  • The Moon is Down - WWII book
  • went to Somerset to investigate Malory (King Arthur and the Round Table)
  • 1962 - Nobel Prize for Literature
    • derision à John Steinbeck never wrote fiction again
  • suffered heart attack and stroke and died

The Red Pony Influences

  • John Steinbeck and friend Max Wagner spent time @ uncle’s ranch

Misc

  • Steinbeck’s writings publicly burned in Salinas on 2 occasions

Malory Influence

  • John Steinbeck and sister borrowed Malory’s words to make their own secret language

Education

  • entered Stanford in 1919
  • focused on self directed reading, creative writing
  • made lifelong friends
  • didn’t pay attention to coursework
  • never graduated

Work

  • 1925-1926 - worked as a construction laborer and reporter in New York

East of Eden

  • Steinbeck enjoyed film version (1955) because..

“…it is a real good picture. I didn’t have anything to do with it. Maybe that’s why. It might be one of the best films I ever saw.”

-to Ritchie Lovejoy, 1955

  • built around the story of Cain and Abel, children of Adam and Eve
  • Cal, the son of Adam, causes his brother, Aron’s death by telling him the secret of their mother’s identity
  • central message of East of Eden is contained in the Hebrew word timshel, translated for Steinbeck as “thou mayest”
    • When God sent Cain into the wilderness, he told him, “Thou mayest rule over sin.” As Adam’s friend, Lee, tells him, “…the workd timshel-‘thou mayest’-that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open.”
    • While Steinbeck was writing East of Eden, he began each day’s work by writing a letter to his editor, Pascal Covick. He took time off from writing to make a wooden box, decorated with the Hebrew word timshel. When the manuscript was completely, he sent it to Covich in the box

Agricultural Influence

  • many of Steinbeck’s works take place in and around Salinas
  • drew on his early experiences as a ranch hand and straw boss to create convincing characters and evocative landscapes

In Dubious Battle

  • John Steinbeck depicts an agricultural strike in early to mid-1930s
  • encounters with Communist organizers gave him material for his work of fiction, predicted with accuracy
  • purpose: “I’m not interested in a strike as a means of raising men’s wages, and I’m not interested in ranting about justice and oppression, mere outcropping which indicate the condition” - letter to friend George Albee
  • worked as a farm laborer
  • worked as a straw boss, supervising gangs of casual laborers known as “bindlestiffs”
    • added to his knowledge of Spanish
    • learned some Tagalog from Filipino workers
    • listened to a lot of stories
  • “I had planned to write a journalistic account of a strike. But as I thought of it as fiction the thing got bigger and bigger…I have used a small strike in an orchard valley as the symbol of man’s eternal, bitter warfare with himself.” - to George Albee, 1935
  • agricultural strikes widespread in CA in the mid-1930s

The Red Pony

  • As his mother lay dying from the effects of a stroke, John Steinbeck wrote a story in 3 parts about a ranch family, the Tiflins, and their hand, Billy Buck. Through the gift and loss of a pony, Jody Tiflin learns about life.
  • Steinbeck’s grandparents owned a ranch in the hills east of King City, used as the setting of The Red Pony film in 1949.
  • “A red pony colt was looking at him out of the stall. Its tense ears were forward and a light of disobedience was in its eyes. Its coat was rough and thick as an Airedale’s fur and its mane was long and tangled. Jody’s throat collapsed in on itself and cut his breath short.”

Steinbeck’s Maternal Grandfather

  • “a big man but delicate in a way”
  • grandfather was a blacksmith
  • very clean, only his hands blackened from the forge

Of Mice and Men

  • tells of a friendship that ends in a tragedy
  • Lennie’s physical/mental anomalies lead him to his downfall, like most of Steinbeck’s characters
  • John Steinbeck referenced many everyday items that fieldworkers owned and used, like playing cards and alarm clocks, etc.

The Grapes of Wrath

  • mid-to-late-1930s, combined effects of years of drought, bad farming practices, crippling debt brought farmers to their knees.
  • Hundreds of thousands abandoned farms and businesses in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Nebraska, Texas, and Missouri, and Kansas fleeing west in search of work and hope.
  • According to Steinbeck, the Joads move from “I to We”

Salinas in the Great Depression

  • Little Oklahoma
    • 1933-1940 - about 3500 Dust Bowl migrants settled in Alisal, east of Salinas
    • 2 local farmers subdivided their properties, offering 50′ x 100′ lots for $200 apiece. Many Okies found work in burgeoning lettuce and vegetable industry, which protected Salinas from some of the worst effects of the Depression.
  • Deportees
    • The arrival of a host of Dust Bowl refugees in CA led to widespread unemployment, especially in the San Joaquin and Imperial valleys. One response was to summarily deport large numbers of Mexican workers, who were seen as competing with U.S. citizens for jobs.
  • Filipinos Organize for Action
    • Since the 1920s, Filipino field workers had become increasingly important to row crop growers. Filipinos in the Salinas Valley had established a baranguay (community association), a Filipino Community Church, and a newspaper, the Philippines Mail.
    • 1934 - Filipino workers organized one of California’s first farm labor unions, the Filipino Labor Supply Association, and called a strike against growers and shippers. Racial discrimination kept workers in ethnically-based unions, limiting their ability to organize.
  • The Salinas Lettuce Strike
    • 1936 - members of the Vegetable Packers Association, most of them Dust Bowl refugees from Alisal, demanded higher wages from the Associated Farmers. The strike turned violent, with barricaded packing sheds and fighting in the streets between strikers and a so-called “citizens’ army.”

I cannot find the gallery's xml file: wp-content/photos//gallery.xml
Please check that the gallery's files have been created on the admin pages!