John Steinbeck, author portrait

John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck, born in Salinas, California, in 1902, grew up in a fertile agricultural valley, about 25 miles from the Pacific Coast. Both the valley and the coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929). After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two California books, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later collected in The Long Valley (1938). Popular success and financial security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935), stories about Monterey’s paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the California laboring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the book considered by many his finest, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The Grapes of Wrath won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1939. Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, and, in 1964, he was presented with the United States Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Steinbeck died in New York in 1968. Today, more than 30 years after his death, he remains one of America's greatest writers and cultural figures.
La perla
East of Eden
Cannery Row
The Grapes of Wrath
Of Mice and Men: Teacher's Deluxe Edition
Travels with Charley in Search of America
The Portable Steinbeck
Of Mice and Men and The Moon Is Down
The Short Novels of John Steinbeck
Bombs Away
The Moon Is Down
The Forgotten Village
Of Mice and Men
Sea of Cortez
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights
The Winter of Our Discontent
Cup of Gold
Sweet Thursday
Once There Was a War
The Short Reign of Pippin IV
Burning Bright
In Dubious Battle
The Grapes of Wrath
The Wayward Bus
The Book of Spies
America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction
Las uvas de la ira
Cannery Row
The Pearl
The Grapes of Wrath
Of Mice and Men
A Russian Journal
The Grapes of Wrath
Tortilla Flat
Travels with Charley in Search of America
The Log from the Sea of Cortez

Books

La perla
East of Eden
Cannery Row
The Grapes of Wrath
Of Mice and Men: Teacher's Deluxe Edition
Travels with Charley in Search of America
The Portable Steinbeck
Of Mice and Men and The Moon Is Down
The Short Novels of John Steinbeck
Bombs Away
The Moon Is Down
The Forgotten Village
Of Mice and Men
Sea of Cortez
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights
The Winter of Our Discontent
Cup of Gold
Sweet Thursday
Once There Was a War
The Short Reign of Pippin IV
Burning Bright
In Dubious Battle
The Grapes of Wrath
The Wayward Bus
The Book of Spies
America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction
Las uvas de la ira
Cannery Row
The Pearl
The Grapes of Wrath
Of Mice and Men
A Russian Journal
The Grapes of Wrath
Tortilla Flat
Travels with Charley in Search of America
The Log from the Sea of Cortez

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NOW AVAILABLE: An Educator’s Guide to a Selection of John Steinbeck’s Nonfiction Works

From the Introduction: John Steinbeck wasn’t necessarily talking about being an adolescent when he wrote his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he received in 1962, but some things in that speech still resonate with my students. “Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion,” he said, alluding

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