OF MICE AND MEN AND THE MOON IS DOWN

Born in Salinas, California, in 1902, JOHN STEINBECK grew up in a fertile agriculture valley about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast—and both valley and 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 and then as a caretaker for a Lake Tahoe estate, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929). After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two California fictions, 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). Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with The Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious student of marine biology with Sea of Cortez (1941). He devoted his services to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play-novelette The Moon Is Down (1942). Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (1947), The Pearl (1947), A Russian Journal (1948), another experimental drama, Burning Bright (1950), and The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951) preceded publication of the monumental East of Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family’s history. The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he traveled widely. Later books included Sweet Thursday (1954), The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957), Once There Was a War (1958), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), America and Americans (1966), and the posthumously published Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969), Viva Zapata! (1975), The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976), and Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (1989). He died in 1968, having won a Nobel Prize in 1962.

 

JAMES EARL JONES was born in Mississippi, raised in Michigan, and moved to New York City after graduating from the University of Michigan and serving in the military. Supporting himself by working as a janitor, he struggled to make it as an actor and made his Broadway debut in 1957. Based on his success in the theater, he began to be cast in small television roles. In the 1960s Jones was one of the first African American actors to appear regularly in daytime soap operas, and he made his film debut in 1964 in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. In 1969 Jones won a Tony Award for his breakthrough role as boxer Jack Johnson in the Broadway hit The Great White Hope (which also garnered him an Oscar nomination for the 1970 film adaptation). In addition to his distinguished career on stage and screen, Jones is an iconic vocal presence in films such as the Star Wars trilogy and The Lion King. Jones is the recipient of many awards as an actor—two Tonys, four Emmys, a Golden Globe, two Cable ACEs, two OBIEs, five Drama Desks, and a Grammy—and has been honored with the National Medal of Arts in 1992 and the John F. Kennedy Center Honor in December 2002. In January 2009, the Screen Actors Guild bestowed Jones with a Lifetime Achievement Award.