...H. Tharp The Unspoken Truth about John Steinbeck’s Legacy in Monterey County John Ernst Jr. Steinbeck is one of the most respected and honored American writers among our society today. In many classrooms around the world, his books are still mandated as reading requirements and there are many museums and centers dedicated to this esteemed author. John Steinbeck has won numerous awards for his books, most notably the Pulitzer Prize for his fictional novel, The Grapes of Wrath in 1940, and the Nobel Prize in literature in 1962 based on his entire body of work. Steinbeck’s other awards, which are typically less known are included in the following chart: WORK | YEAR | AWARD | MEDIUM | “The Murder” | 1934 | O. Henry Award | Print | Tortilla Flat | 1935 | Commonwealth Club of California Gold Medal for Best Novel by a Californian | Print | In Dubious Battle | 1936 | Ibid | Print | Of Mice and Men | 1938 | N.Y Drama Critic’s Circle Award | Play | “The Promise” | 1938 | O. Henry Award | Print | Of Mice and Men | 1939 | American Bookseller’s Award | Print | LifeBoat | 1944 | Academy Award nominee for Best Story | Print | A Medal for Benny | 1945 | Ibid | Print | The Moon is Down | 1946 | King Haakon Liberty Cross | Print | Viva Zapata! | 1952 | Academy Award nominee for Best Original Screenplay | Play | N/A | 1963 | Honorary Consultant in American Literature to the Library of Congress | N/A | N/A | 1964 | U.S Medal of Freedom; Press Medal of Freedom | N/A...
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...John Steinbeck Research Paper: Final Draft John Steinbeck is regarded as the “quintessential American writer.” He created many works of literature that “evoke life in the 20th century with compassion and lyrical precision” (Li). John Steinbeck’s most popular works such as Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939) explore the darker side of life in America for farm laborers. Though these works were considered highly controversial, they gained him major recognition. Of Mice and Men was adapted as a play in 1938 and was declared the best play by New York Drama Critics’ Circle. He went on to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1940 for The Grapes of Wrath. In 1962, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature (Schultz & Li). As a child and youth, Steinbeck spent a lot of time working on farms and interacting with other migrant workers. His experiences with migrant farm workers created the foundation for Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. John Ernst Steinbeck was born on February 27th 1902 in Salinas California to John Ernst Steinbeck Sr. and Olivia Hamilton Steinbeck. Steinbeck Sr. managed a flour mill, and his mother Olivia was a teacher in a school, thus securing the family a middle class income (Bender). His mother Olivia looked to “mold him into a man of broad intellectual capacity” (Kiernan). She read him several books as a child and, by the age of five, he could read. In school he was teased for “his large ears…so he withdrew into books.” His...
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...Nikki Slomers Mrs. Moser AP English 11 28 March 2014 Steinbeck’s Philosophical Theory and Influences The Grapes of Wrath, a story of the Joads’ journey from Oklahoma to California in search of the American dream during the Great Depression era. Thousands upon thousands of people had to pack up and leave the land that they were born and raised on due to the Dust Bowl and the banks foreclosing on acres and acres of property. Having lived through this time period, John Steinbeck, the author of the novel The Grapes of Wrath is no stranger to the conditions these people lived in. Traveling with migrant farm workers for a few years in Salinas California, John adopted a very specific philosophical theory from the many influences around him. John Steinbeck’s philosophical theory, including transcendentalism and the concept of the oversoul, humanism, earthy democracy, and pragmatism, all play an important role in the development of his characters in The Grapes of Wrath. To begin, one of the most important characters in the novel, Jim Casy, “the preacher”, single-handedly interprets and embodies the philosophy of the author John Steinbeck and the novel itself. Tom Joad and Jim Casy cross paths while Tom was on his way home to find his family after just being released from prison. The two men, having been long time friends, decide to walk together and catch up. Jim vents to Tom, and tells him about not preaching anymore. “I was a preacher,” the man [Jim Casy] said seriously, “but...
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...06 November 2012 John Steinbeck: A Champion for the Common Man Born with the hand of a writer, John Steinbeck’s career sparked great political controversy, and greatly influenced the writings of his time. Widely considered one of America’s greatest novelists, his books are still frequently studied in school. Among his many accomplishments is the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Nobel Prize in Literature. With notable works such as The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, he expressed his dissatisfaction with capitalism and his sympathy for the struggle of the common worker in a way that captured the world’s attention – which resulted in some of his work even being banned. In the novel Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck explores the pervasive theme of loneliness and illustrates the fallacy of the American Dream. Widely considered his masterpiece, however, is The Grapes of Wrath which depicts the struggle of a family of Oklahoman farmers who are forced into a migratory existence due to the drought and dust storms following the Great Depression. When considering both The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, it is clear Steinbeck drew from his own personal experiences as a laborer when writing each of these novels. On February 27, 1902 in Salinas, California, John and Olive Steinbeck welcomed their third child and only son, John Ernst Steinbeck. John Ernst Steinbeck, Sr. was a county treasurer and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck was a schoolteacher. By all accounts, Steinbeck enjoyed...
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...The Grapes of Wrath a well-known classic by John Steinbeck was published in 1939, and before it was published, migrant workers were living in very harsh conditions in several parts of the United States. The Grapes of Wrath is about an Oklahoma Dust Bowl family, the Joads, who suffer various hardships while migrating to California. The Dust Bowl was a period of time in the 1930s where harsh droughts led to severe dust storms which ruined million acres of prairie land in America. This story tells us the plight of all those migrants during the Great Depression through the perspective of the Joad family. In The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck uses intercalary chapters to provide background for the various themes of the novel, as well as to set the tone. Steinbeck’s previous book had bought him much success and Steinbeck did not want his success to weaken his commitment to the intellectual goals of his writing. So later, he embarked upon a trip from Oklahoma to California with a group of migrant workers. He worked and lived alongside them in a work camp in California. His experience was the inspiration for this novel. The story begins just after Tom Joad is released on parole from McAlester prison for homicide. On his journey to his home in Oklahoma, he meets former preacher Jim Casy whom he remembers from his childhood and the two travel together. He finds out his family has been evacuated from their land and are leaving for California. Tom and Casy join them. Going west on Route 66...
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...the Working Class: John Steinbeck and His Mark on Literature Writing has left influence on millions. Books have transformed lives, given purpose and happiness to those who have read them: literature is one of the most important things to a society, as it not only allows its readers to grow intellectually, but also creatively. John Steinbeck was once just a nine year old with Le Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Malory, who then went on to be someone considered one of the best writers of his time. Steinbeck has been held up next to authors like Edgar Allen Poe, and his writing is taught in most, if not every, high schools in America. Very few people are born famous and even less are born skilled in their field. Steinbeck was born in Salinas,...
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...Imagine: it is 1892 and you are a factory worker for Carnegie Steel Company. You spend your days in assembly lines, tired, sweaty and underpaid. You work all day, yet when you get home, you cannot afford to feed your family. With the wages you are paid, economic prosperity is out of your reach. You have heard that a local steel union is organizing a strike to campaign for higher wages, but you know that as soon as you walk out the door, ten others will walk in to take your job. You are hopeless. Flash forward to 1930, now you are small farmer, but the same issues still plague you. After being forced from your home you flee to the west coast in hopes of a modern promised land, but find only oppression and squalor. This is the setting of John...
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...As some of the paramount examples of early 20th century literature, John Steinbeck's novels not only encompass the epitomes in characteristics of the laboring class, but also demonstrate the resilience of the human spirit. Through stories of the downtrodden, Steinbeck teaches the reader a much-needed lesson about the complexity of the world in which we live and the people's response to that complexity. Of Mice and Men's protagonist, George, convincingly personifies the dispiriting mood that spanned America at the time of the Great Depression. Attempting to find work in California, George is depicted as a capable, yet underprivileged, laborer who begins to form conceptions on the dynamics of society. Through George's journey, Steinbeck paints a picture of a typical American worker in the Depression-ridden country, and in turn shows the reader the unfortunate realization that the main character comes to as he searches for a job: the world is designed for the weak to become weaker and strong to become stronger. In other words, the concept of social Darwinism prevails in this novel as, time and time again, the main characters are forced into an endless cycle of poverty (want to say something along these lines but a different word than poverty). "Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don't belong no place. They come to a ranch an' work up a stake and then go inta town and blow their stake, and the first thing...
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...A March 10, 2015 One author gives a firsthand account of what it was like to live through The Great Depression. Read this excerpt of John Steinbeck's essay "I Remember the Thirties."Then, answer the following questions based on Steinbeck’s rhetorical strategies. 1. The author says the decade had "a beginning, middle and end." His essay also has this structure. Briefly describe these three sections in Steinbeck's essay.Essentially the beginning, the middle, and the end he refers to are the beginning, middle, and end of the Great Depression. He described lie before the Depression as a writer. During the Depression, he described how tough life was and how writers were hard hit. After the Depression, he described the success he encountered in s his book. 2. What is Steinbeck's attitude towards those who "had it made" at the beginning of the decade? Quote the words or phrases that lead you to this conclusion.Steinbeck’s attitude toward those wo had it made was almost one of pity or somberness. He knew that those who had it made were not on solid footing and that the money they had could go as fast as they received it. What really helped me was “Their eyes had the look you see around the roulette table.” Meaning that they did not know what to expect next and had their hopes penned on something that was not even certain. 3. Steinbeck's use of sensory details provides a vivid description of life during that period. Choose two phrases containing sensory details and discuss...
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...John Steinbeck was born in 1902 in Salinas, California, a region that became the setting for much of his fiction, including Of Mice and Men. As a teenager, he spent his summers working as a hired hand on neighboring ranches, where his experiences of rural California and its people impressed him deeply. In 1919, he enrolled at Stanford University, where he studied intermittently for the next six years before finally leaving without having earned a degree. For the next five years, he worked as a reporter and then as caretaker for a Lake Tahoe estate while he completed his first novel, an adventure story called Cup of Gold, which was published in 1929. Critical and commercial success did not come for another six years, when Tortilla Flat was published in 1935, at which point Steinbeck was finally able to support himself entirely with his writing. In his acceptance speech for the 1962 Nobel Prize in literature, Steinbeck said: . . . the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature. Steinbeck’s best-known works deal intimately with the plight of desperately poor California wanderers, who, despite the cruelty of their circumstances...
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...Prior to writing the book, Steinbeck took a “four week journey from Bakersfield to Needles in which he lived and worked with Depression migrants.”(Reuben, Paul P) During World War I, wheat prices were high so most farmers plowed the grassland and planted dry land wheat as “bushel of wheat sold for $1 in 1929.”(The Farmers Plight) Because of over production, wheat dropped to “$.30 cents in 1932” and farmers were not prepared for the phenomenon of the Dust Bowl. (The Farmers Plight) Steinbeck’s novel begins by detailing the dust bowl that hit Oklahoma, "Houses were shut tight, and cloth wedged around doors and windows, but the dust came in so thinly that it could not be seen in the air, and it settled like pollen on the chairs and tables, on the dishes."(Steinbeck pg. 3) Drought and soil erosion brought on by over farming turned the agricultural land of the Great Plains into a giant dust bowl during the 1930’s. The once rich grassland turned into a giant dust bowl during the 1930’s “due to drought and soil erosion brought on by over farming” (Divine, APP). Herman Goertzen, a Midwestern farmer experienced one of the most devastating storms first hand, “It was like a black wall that went over that area, south of us, there. It went through and it was just like shutting a barn door.”(Goetzen) He states, “The iron guard bit into the house corner, crumbled the wall and wrenched the little house from its foundations so that it fell sideways, crushed like a...
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...and the issues that it raises. John Steinbeck’s reliance on dialogue, as opposed to contextual description, makes the work accessible to young readers, as does his use of foreshadowing and recurrent images. Equally important is the way in which he intertwines the themes of loneliness and friendship and gives dignity to those characters, especially Lennie and Crooks, who are clearly different from their peers. By focusing on a group of lonely drifters, Steinbeck highlights the perceived isolation and sense of “otherness” that can seem so overwhelming when one is growing up. Of Mice and Men is also important because it explores the way in which events can conspire against the realization of one’s dreams. It pits a group of flawed individuals against a set of circumstances that they are unable to master or, in the case of Lennie, even to comprehend. This is a theme that Steinbeck also explores in his classic novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939). When Steinbeck began Of Mice and Men, he was planning to write a children’s book called Something That Happened. His intent was to demonstrate that events often have a momentum of their own and need not reflect the existence of a higher power that is exacting punishment. Perhaps it was for this reason that he decided to retitle the book, drawing from Robert Burns’s oft-quoted poem “To a Mouse,” which contains the line “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley.” Throughout John Steinbeck’s career, his affinity and compassion...
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...after the stock market crashed, and the middle of the Great Depression. He came into office with more problems than any other president has faced. President Hoover did not do anything to help the country during those first years of the Great Depression, if anything he worsened everything. The first hundred days in office were the most vigorous days of his presidential career. FDR affected not only the country and the people who lived during that time; he gave authors of that time something to write about. Many literature pieces were based on the Great Depression; however, FDR was trying to change the direction of the country so everything he did was also put into perspective when authors were creating literature pieces. In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck writes about a family, the Joad family, who experiences all the struggles of the Great Depression. They make their journey to California to fulfill their hope of getting a fruit-picking job there. Steinbeck writes this book as if it were a true story, which in many ways it was considering how many families experienced this hardship during the Great Depression. Ma Joad is the mother of the family who goes on this journey to reach California. Ma is the only thing that holds their family together because she gives them name 2 hope and the support they need to keep moving. In a way, she and FDR are alike by the role they play. Ma is the glue that is keeping her family from breaking, and FDR was the glue that held...
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...Following his success, he was awarded the nobel peace prize Married the singer Gwyndolyn Conger In 1944, his first son Thom was born He divorced his second wife in 1948 and married his third wife in 1950 In 1963 he travelled to Europe on a United states Information Agency cultural tour He died on December 20, 1969 and was buried in the garden of memories cemetery, Salinas. 2. Philosophy in his acceptance speech. In steinbeck’s acceptance speech, he stresses the importance of literature in the plight of mankind. His philosophy is that humans need literature in their lives to express all that is great about living. He also expresses that it is the responsibility of the writer to express the the perfectibility of man. 3. what influenced Steinbeck. Steinbeck wrote of mice and men to depict what the migrant workers and farm labourers went through. His experience as a farmer influenced him to write this story because he witnessed first-hand what they endured. He also lived in the time of the great depression. 4. other major works. The Grapes of Wrath written in 1939 and won the Pulitzer prize. East of Eden Written in 1952...
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...The classic novel “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck depicts the struggles the Joads, an impoverished Oklahoma family, face when attempting to find a better life. When forced to leave their comfortable home, the Joads’ only option is to migrate to California. Striving to keep the family stable the Joads tragically transition from being an average family to being a stressed, decaying family. This deterioration results from being treated like emotionless slaves by the wealthy owners of large corporations. Steinbeck creates events in the literature that parallel the need to improve 1930‘s and 40’s treatment of migrant workers. Three situations that demonstrate the author’s protest for change include the demolishment of the Joad house, Granpa’s...
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