John Steinbeck was an American author that was born on February 27, 1902 in Salinas, California. He came from a reasonably wealthy family and he worked his way through college at Stanford University, although he never graduated.

Fact 1:    He is well known for his novels about social costs of the great depression in America. He is famous for the books, Of Mice and Men (1937), The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and East of Eden (1952).

Fact 2:    John Steinbeck’s family is of German immigrant descendent and they lived in a small country town. He spent most of his summers working on ranches that were close by to help during harvest time and to earn extra money. When Steinbeck worked on the ranches he gathered insight into the lives of migrant workers, and later his experiences provided him with ideas for his famous books.

Fact 3:    Steinbeck left the university in 1925 trying to establish himself as a writer in New York. He was not able successfully make a career for himself and was then forced to do odd jobs to support himself. Steinbeck was discouraged in 1928 and returned to California where he took a job as a caretaker in Tahoe city. He managed to publish his first novel, Cup of Gold, in 1929 despite working full time. After a few years he received money from his father and was able to stop working his full time job and devote more time to his writing in his father’s cottage which was located in Pacific Grove, Monterery, California.

Fact 4:    Steinbeck supported the FDR’s Liberal New Deal and he had solid contacts with left-wing writers and labor union figures. He wrote strongly in support of the Vietnam war, in 1967 when he went to Vietnam, many people felt this was a compromise to earlier liberal views. Steinbeck complained that the government harassed him because of his political outlook and he argued that J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI persuaded the tax authorities to bother him.

Fact 5:    In 1930 John Steinbeck married Carol Henning and in 1942 they divorced and he remarried, Gwndolyn Conger and they had one child named John Steinbeck IV. Steinbeck wrote a novel during the Second World War, inspired by the spirit of resistance to German occupation called The Moon is Down (1942).

Fact 6:    Steinbeck went through a period of mental depression in 1948 when a close friend, Ed Ricketts passed away in an accident. Gwndolyn insisted that Steinbeck and her divorce shortly afterwards. Rickets had inspired a lot of Steinbeck’s writing during his most creative periods in the 1930s.

Fact 7:    In 1952, Steinbeck wrote his last novel, East of Eden, after he remarried for the third time in 1950.

Fact 8:    The Victorian house where John Steinbeck grew up in Salinas is still standing today.

Fact 9:    When Steinbeck was a teenager he had his own pony, he named it Jill, and this was an inspiration for his novel titled, The Red Pony. When he was a teenager he had a very strong interest in writing and he would stay up late at night in his attic room in Salinas writing stories. Steinbeck said, “ I used to sit in that little room upstairs,” he remembers, “and write little stories and little pieces and send them out to magazines under a false name and I never put a return address on them…I wonder what I was thinking of? I was scared to death to get a rejection slip, but more, to get an acceptance.”

Fact 10:    John Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962. His great novels were cited by the Nobel Committee and Steinbeck was humble, he questioned whether he deserved the prize. After 1962 Steinbeck did not write any more novels and later died in 1968.