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Biography of John Steinbeck

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John Ernst Steinbeck Jr is one of America’s greatest novelists. Steinbeck was born February 27th, 1902 and died of a heart attack on December 20th, 1968.(nobel page 1) He is the son of John Steinbeck and Olive Hamilton. Steinbeck wrote 27 books. Some of his best known work includes Of Mice and Men (1937), The Long Valley (1938), and East of Eden (1962). Since Steinbeck was raised and grew up in the early 1900’s, his novels were greatly influenced by the hard rural labor that many people worked in. Many of Steinbeck’s could be classified as social novels because he often wrote about the economic problems of the rural labor.

Being born in Salinas, California, many of Steinbeck's novels were based in that area. He had a happy childhood and grew up with three sisters. Steinbeck was intelligent and shy and from a young age he learned to appreciate hard working people and the land. He looked up to his father who worked hard to support the family. “His father, John Ernst Steinbeck, tried his hand at several different jobs to keep his family fed: He owned a feed-and-grain store, managed a flour plant and was the treasurer of Monterrey County. His mother, Olive Hamilton Steinbeck, was a former schoolteacher.” (bio page1)

At 14 years old Steinbeck realized that he loved writing and would frequently lock himself in his room and write all day. Since Steinbeck was very smart and did well at school, The University of Stanford, a very prestigious school, would accept him and he enrolled there in 1919. Steinbeck only went to Stanford to please his parents and didn’t want to disappoint them. Eventually, he would declare that his only true interest is to write and there would be no reason to be in school so he dropped out of The University o...

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...beck received the Nobel Prize for literature. The president of the United States at that time (Lyndon Johnson) allocated Steinbeck with the Medal in Freedom and to top everything off he was on a U.S. postage stamp. John Steinbeck will always be remembered in American literature history.

Works Cited

"Biography." IMDb. IMDb.com, n.d. Web. 27 Feb. 2014
JACK, PETER MONRO. "John Steinbeck's New Novel Brims With Anger and Pity."Nytimes.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Feb. 2014.
"John Steinbeck Biography." Bio.com. A&E Networks Television, n.d. Web. 26 Feb. 2014.
"John Steinbeck Biography." John Steinbeck. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Feb. 2014.

"John Steinbeck - Biographical". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2013. Web. 26 Feb 2014.

"The Big Read." The Grapes of Wrath. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Feb. 2014.
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