1902 — John Steinbeck is born on February 27 in Salinas, a Northern California agricultural town. On his bedroom wall his mother hangs a picture of George Washington so that her only son might “catch” a bit of presidential greatness.
1919-25 — John enrolls at Stanford University, 100 miles north of Salinas. Away from strict parents and his hometown, John enjoys what Stanford has to offer—freedom, friends, and writing instruction—and, in ROTC training, the opportunity to ride a horse regularly. He drops in and out of university.
1925 — John hops a freighter to New York City, determined to break into the world of published writers.
1926-28 — Unpublished, discouraged, and broke, John returns home and finds a job as caretaker for a Lake Tahoe estate, spending two long winters holed up in a cabin honing his craft. “No, I am not becoming handsomer… My face,” Steinbeck admitted to a college friend, “gets more and more Irish looking, and I have never heard anyone say that the Irish are a handsome race.”
John Steinbeck as a teenager. He wrote in later years, “You must know that the story cycle of King Arthur and his knights, particularly in the Malory version, has been my passion since my ninth birthday, when I was given a copy of the ‘Morte d’Arthur.’ Then my little sister, Mary, and I became knight and squire, and we even used the archaic and obsolete middle English words as a secret language.”
1929 — Steinbeck’s swashbuckling first novel, Cup of Gold—A Life of Henry Morgan, Buccaneer, with Occasional Reference to History, is published to scant reviews.
1930 — John marries Carol Henning of San Jose, a feisty, witty woman and John’s faithful in-house editor during their decade of marriage.
1931 — With the help of college friends, John finds a New York literary agency, McIntosh & Otis, to help place his fiction. The women running the firm become his lifelong friends.
1932 — The Pastures of Heaven, Steinbeck’s first California fiction, is published. It is a collection of short stories about a meddlesome family who move into what seems an edenic valley.
1933 — In To a God Unknown, a novel he had wrestled with for years, Steinbeck writes through his metaphysical notions about humans and place, pantheism, and mysticism. Steinbeck’s thinking is profoundly influenced by Joseph Campbell and Robinson Jeffers.
1935 — With Tortilla Flat, a wry tale about the paisanos of Monterey, Steinbeck hits pay dirt. Using royalty income, John and Carol visit Mexico; he later writes that he feels “related to Spanish people much more than to Anglo-Saxons.”
1936 — In Dubious Battle, one of the best strike novels of the twentieth century, is published. His growing reputation as a socially engaged writer catches the attention of the editor of the San Francisco News, who sends Steinbeck on a journalistic assignment—to report on the plight of the Okies in California. Steinbeck’s hard-hitting articles, “The Harvest Gypsies,” are published in October.
1937 — Of Mice and Men, one of Steinbeck’s finest novels, is published to a widely admiring audience. A few months later, on November 23, George Kaufman opens the play Of Mice and Men in New York City. To Kaufman’s disappointment, John never comes East to see the play, which wins the New York Drama Critics Circle award the following year.
1938 — Steinbeck’s editor, Pascal Covici, brings out a collection of Steinbeck’s short stories for Viking Press, The Long Valley. Viking remains Steinbeck’s publisher for the rest of his career.
1939 — Viking Press spends more on the publicity campaign for The Grapes of Wrath than for any other book in its history. But, at the height of his fame, lionized and criticized, Steinbeck wants only to escape the publicity. In Los Angeles he meets Gwyn Conger, who will become his second wife four years later.
1940 — John Steinbeck is a “household name,” declares publicity for two superb films: Lewis Milestone’s Of Mice and Men, released in December 1939, and John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, released in January 1940. The Grapes of Wrath is awarded the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
John escapes to the sea in March 1940 on a voyage of discovery with his wife, Carol, and his friend Edward F. Ricketts.
Tortilla Flat, a painting by Penny Worthington.
1941 — Sea of Cortez, cowritten by Steinbeck and Ricketts, is published a few days before Pearl Harbor. Steinbeck’s best work of nonfiction initially receives little notice and less appreciation. The Forgotten Village, a documentary film, is released.
The Grapes of Wrath was published to worldwide acclaim and controversy in 1939. This is a later Spanish edition.
Steinbeck depicted writing Sea of Cortez in a painting by Judith Diem. Notice how he holds his pencil; he had such large calluses from spending so much time writing that he had to hold his pencil awkwardly.
1942 — Steinbeck is passionately committed to helping the war effort. In The Moon Is Down (a book and a play) he imagines what it must be like to live in an occupied northern European village. He is attacked as being unpatriotic and “soft” on Nazis. In November, Bombs Away, a book about training bomber teams, is published.
1943 — Steinbeck’s divorce from Carol is finalized in March and a few days later he marries Gwyn Conger in New Orleans. Weeks after the wedding, the restless and committed patriot goes overseas as a war correspondent for the New York Herald-Tribune, determined to witness action at the front. He wires eighty-six dispatches to newspapers in the United States and London.
1944 — Son Thom is born on August 2. Steinbeck and Gwyn briefly move back to his home turf, the Monterey Peninsula, where the world-famous author feels out of place: “If I bring good whiskey to a party, I’m elitist; if I bring Dago Red I’m cheap,” he reportedly said. Local business interests give this “communist” writer the cold shoulder.
1945 — Steinbeck’s nostalgic, humorous, and complex novel about Monterey, Cannery Row, is published. Ricketts writes to a friend that the book was written “as an essay on loneliness.” Steinbeck returns to New York with Gwyn.
1946 — Son John IV is born on June 12 in New York City. John’s marriage to Gwyn is troubled by her suspected infidelity and her taunts—all untrue—that his younger son is not his own.
1947 — The Wayward Bus is published. Steinbeck goes to Russia with photographer Robert Capa to interview the people living in postwar Russia—his focus is solidly on people, not politics, he declares. In November The Pearl is published, a parable about temptation and power set in Mexico (released as a film the same year).
1948 — A Russian Journal is published. This year proves to be one of the writer’s worst. His best friend, Ed Ricketts, dies in May, after being hit by a train. Gwyn and John part ways in August.
1950 — John releases some of the rancor he feels toward his divorce and fatherhood in his third and final play-novelette, Burning Bright. He marries for the third time, this a happy and stable union with Elaine Anderson Scott, once an assistant stage manager on Broadway. They settle into an apartment on 72nd Street in New York City.
1952 — Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata! is released in March. Steinbeck’s novel about Salinas, East of Eden, is published in September. Steinbeck and Elaine take off for Europe, where they will spend many happy months over the years satisfying his wanderlust and her love of exotic locales. He writes journalistic pieces for various magazines.
1954 — Sweet Thursday, a frothy sequel to Cannery Row written for the musical theater, is published, a book about “what might have happened” to Ed Ricketts.
1955 — East of Eden, featuring James Dean in his first starring role, hits the theaters. John and Elaine buy a summerhouse in Sag Harbor, New York, and begin to split their time between that house and their apartment in Manhattan. The musical Pipe Dream by Rodgers and Hammerstein, based on Sweet Thursday, opens on Broadway.
1957 — The Short Reign of Pippin IV, a satire on French politics, is published. Steinbeck begins research on a beloved project, a modern translation of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. (Never completed, his draft was published posthumously as The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights in 1976.)
1958 — Once There Was a War, a collection of his war journalism, is published.
1960 — After fainting spells that signal a weak heart, John plans a trip across America with the poodle Charley as his only companion. Charley is Elaine’s dog, and she urges John to take Charley for protection, to bark for help if he is ill. John tells Elaine that he’s “taking Charley, not Lassie!” Travels with Charley is published in1962.
John Steinbeck, the year he died.
1961 — John publishes his twelfth and final novel, The Winter of Our Discontent, which is the occasion for his receiving the Nobel Prize in 1962.
1963 — John, Elaine, and Edward Albee travel with the U.S. State Department to Scandinavia, Russia, and Eastern Europe.
1966 — Steinbeck’s last book, America and Americans, a jeremiad about the country’s wavering morality, ecological waste, and ethnic distrust, is published. He travels on assignment with Newsday to Vietnam. His admiration for the U.S. soldiers’ dedication and his hatred of communism make many think that he supports the unpopular war—in fact, he has grave doubts about Lyndon Johnson’s policies. “Letters to Alicia” run in papers around the country.
1968 — John Steinbeck dies of heart failure in New York City, December 20.
