John Steinbeck's Accomplishments

For as long as life has existed it has struggled to survive, while humans have advanced far above other species it is still a challenge for many to make it to the next day. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is a unique book that provides an invaluable insight into the conditions faced by the migrant workers in California during the Dust Bowl Era, who truly struggled each and every day. Steinbeck’s masterpiece accurately portrays the hardships these poor Americans faced in the aftermath of an unexpected ecological disaster. Steinbeck’s masterpiece is an incredibly deep novel, with an abundance of imagery, copious amounts of charming local dialect, and an incredibly ambiguous theme. The powerful combination of Steinbeck’s descriptive writing

His father was John Ernst Steinbeck and his mother was Olive Hamilton Steinbeck (DeMott xiv). Steinbeck’s life was rather unremarkable until his enrollment in Stanford University in 1919 where, he took courses in English and literature intermittently until 1925 when he left the university without obtaining a degree. Steinbeck wrote 17 novels in total during his career as an author, including his three of his most successful: In Dubious Battle, written in 1936, Of Mice and Men, written in 1937, and the book that was the pinnacle of his career: The Grapes of Wrath, which was written in 1939 (Penguin Group I). Steinbeck had a personal interest in telling the stories of the agricultural workers, as he spent the summers of his youth working on nearby ranches and sugar beet farms with migrant workers (“John Steinbeck”). Although Steinbeck spent months researching and interviewing migrant workers as a basis for the novel, he only spent four short months writing The Grapes of Wrath: as a result, Steinbeck was extremely concerned that he would not be able to accurately portray the migrant workers plight to the American public (DeMott vii-viii). When his novel finally hit the shelves, it became an unimaginable success, selling over 400,000 copies in its first year and becoming the number one bestseller of 1939 (DeMott viii-ix). The novel’s success did not end there, in 1940 The Grapes of Wrath