With Tortilla Flat (1935), Steinbeck's career took a decidedly positive turn, receiving the California Commonwealth Club's Gold Medal. Here, not far from famed Cannery Row, heart of the California sardine industry, Steinbeck found material he would later use for two more works, Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row. Two subsequent novels, The Pastures of Heaven and To A God Unknown, met the same fate.Īfter moving to the Monterey Peninsula in 1930, Steinbeck and his new wife, Carol Henning, made their home in Pacific Grove. Though his first novel, Cup of Gold, was published in 1929, it attracted little literary attention. He was unsuccessful and returned, disappointed, to California the following year. Steinbeck left Stanford permanently in 1925 to pursue a career in writing in New York City. During this time he attended only sporadically while working at a variety jobs including on with the Big Sur highway project, and one at Spreckels Sugar Company near Salinas. Stanford did not claim his undivided attention. In 1919, he graduated from Salinas High School as president of his class and entered Stanford University majoring in English. Young Steinbeck came to know the Salinas Valley well, working as a hired hand on nearby ranches in Monterey County. His mother, Olive Hamilton, was a former schoolteacher who developed in him a love of literature. His father, John Steinbeck, served as Monterey County Treasurer for many years. John Ernst Steinbeck, Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner, was born in Salinas, California February 27, 1902. Awards-Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, 1940.Education-Studied marine biology at Stanford University,.

A masterpiece of Steinbeck’s later years, East of Eden is a powerful and vastly ambitious novel that is at once a family saga and a modern retelling of the Book of Genesis. One boy thrives, nurtured by the love of all those around him the other grows up in loneliness, enveloped by a mysterious darkness.įirst published in 1952, East of Eden is the work in which Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love’s absence. But the birth of his twins, Cal and Aron, brings his wife to the brink of madness, and Adam is left alone to raise his boys to manhood. Set in the rich farmland of California’s Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families-the Trasks and the Hamiltons-whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.Īdam Trask came to California from the East to farm and raise his family on the new, rich land. In his journal, John Steinbeck called East of Eden “the first book,” and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth.

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