John steinbeck

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John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California USA in 1902. His mother was a teacher, and it was from her that John learned to love books. His parents wanted him to be a lawyer, but at an early age he had already decided that he wanted to be an author. He wrote a lot of story’s during his years in school and sent them, without his name, to different magazines and newspapers. When he was young he also worked on different farms around his home in California, something he would have a lot of use for later. After his exam at Salinas High School in 1919, he went on to study at Stanford University. After a few years and without an exam from the university, he left Stanford to go to New York in search of a life as an author and journalist.

At the beginning John didn’t caught peoples attention the way he had hoped with his profession as an author. His first novel “Cup of gold”, which he wrote in 1929, didn’t get any important attention at all and neither did his two following novels.

It was first in the 1930´s that John Steinbeck reached the big public with “Tortilla Flat”, a collection humoristic stories about outsiders who had problems to fit in the society. It was with “Tortilla Flat” that Steinbeck found many of the themes that were going to follow his authorship and make him one of the 20th century’s most famous authors.

His stories takes places in an environment he knew very well from his own childhood back home in Salinas and other places in California. He describes people who stand outside the society and how they are dreaming about success, independence and freedom. This was something that not everyone got the chance to.

During the 1930´s, John Steinbeck achieves recognition and stature in a way only a few other American authors had done, like Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.

“Of mice and men” is the book I have read. It’s a short novel which came out in 1937. The story was first created as a play, and is based on a poem from the 18th century by Robert Burns. In this poem the mouse’s nest and future plans was crushed by the farmers plow. In Steinbeck’s book, the main characters are two poor farm workers, named George and Lennie who moved from farm to farm to make enough money so they could buy their own land. The book takes place during the big depression in the 1930´s, and unfortunately Lennie is mentally handicapped and doesn’t have the capability to see right from wrong. For George this means he always has to keep an eye out for Lennie so he doesn’t get in trouble. The relation between these men is very special, and the story is in fact kind of sad, but the way John wrote it and describes certain things makes the novel a bit humoristic too. Things can go wrong so quickly and easily.
John Steinbeck’s experiences from when he worked on a farm came to be an important piece of inspiration when he wrote this book. In “Of mice and men” he describes clearly the different kinds of people you can meet on a farm, how the relations between them are, and how different they’re being treated just because of the colour of their skin.

I really enjoyed reading this novel, the plot was interesting and I didn’t have a clue of what was going to happen in the end. The book describes a characterized morality about how bad things can go for exposed people who have no property of their own. It seems like Steinbeck really knows what he is writing about, considering all of his books are in one way or another related to his own life and things he have done.

John wrote “The Grapes of Wrath”, his most popular book in 1939. The book became a bestseller and gave him the Pulitzer Prize in 1940. But for a long time “The Grapes of Wrath” came to be the most forbidden book in the United States. Many schools and libraries refused to buy the book because it was accused to be communist propaganda. To escape the hard criticism for his involvement in social and left-winged party´s, Steinbeck worked as a war correspondent during the Second World War for the New York Harald.

After the war he had written a few novels which in different ways were focused on the modern, materialistic and unemotional world. In the novels ”Cannery Row” and “The Wayward Bus”, we can find characters who in search for the good life, are being influenced and stopped by the modern society’s expectations and conventions. We can also find a kind of criticism to the civilization in “The pearl”, where a poor Mexican fisher finds a huge pearl, but instead of happiness the pearl only brings bad luck. After the war the plot in his books still were about peoples dreams about the perfect life, but n...