When was john steinbeck alive

He had a serious kidney infection that required hospital treatment. He had an operation on a detached retina, an operation to remove varicose veins and another to repair a shattered knee cap after a balcony rail gave way on the second floor of his Manhattan home. In he suffered a stroke, in he had a suspected heart attack.

At the end of his life, he was poleaxed by a back injury that required complicated surgery. As fate would have it, an injury to a stranger was one of the decisive factors in pushing Steinbeck towards full-time writing. In New York, he worked on a building site, ferrying wheelbarrows loaded with pounds of cement, during the construction of Madison Square Garden.

Six weeks into the job, a co-worker fell to a bloody death near where Steinbeck stood. The horrific sight made Steinbeck throw up. He quit his job that night. His uncle helped him land a job as a reporter for the New York American , a William Randolph Hearst newspaper, but he quickly became disillusioned by journalism and returned to California.

He worked as a tour guide and it was in that job he met his first wife Carol Henning. It was the start of a career that would produce 16 novels and novellas, two sets of short stories, 11 non-fiction books, two plays, two screenplays and a large volume of letters. Steinbeck sometimes played up to the image of a struggling writer whose upbringing was hard financially. This deeply affecting story about the oppression of migrant workers, who were fleeing from the Dust Bowl states to California, struck a chord with an America reeling from the Great Depression.

By February , the novel was in its 11th printing, having sold nearly half a million copies. More than 15 million copies were bought in the next eight decades and around 50, copies are still bought in America every year. The film adaptation of the novel, starring Henry Fonda, is considered a Hollywood classic. They became angry at these newcomers. Gradually, through government and through the work of private citizens, agencies were set up to take care of these situations.

The Grapes of Wrath was making Steinbeck world famous just as the year-old began to fall for a year-old nightclub singer called Gwyn Conger, whom he married in Three decades later, as a divorcee in her late fifties, Conger gave a series of interviews in Palm Springs to a show business writer called Douglas Brown.

These interviews remained unpublished for more than four decades, until they were discovered in a loft in Wales in John Steinbeck. What was the cause of John Steinbeck's death? Heart failure. What does Grapes of Wrath title mean? What was a personal obstacle Steinbeck faced? Where did Steinbeck become fascinated with marine life and oceanography?

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What book did Steinbeck win the Nobel Prize? What is a Nobel Prize? What are three adjectives that describe John Steinbeck's life? For the most part, Steinbeck — who grew up with three sisters — had a happy childhood.

He was shy but smart. He formed an early appreciation for the land and in particular California's Salinas Valley, which would greatly inform his later writing. According to accounts, Steinbeck decided to become a writer at the age of 14, often locking himself in his bedroom to write poems and stories. In , Steinbeck enrolled at Stanford University — a decision that had more to do with pleasing his parents than anything else — but the budding writer would prove to have little use for college.

Over the next six years, Steinbeck drifted in and out of school, eventually dropping out for good in , without a degree. Following Stanford, Steinbeck tried to make a go of it as a freelance writer. He briefly moved to New York City, where he found work as a construction worker and a newspaper reporter, but then returned to California, where he took a job as a caretaker in Lake Tahoe and began his writing career.

Steinbeck wrote 31 books over the course of his career. Two poor migrant workers, George and Lennie, are working for the American dream in California during the Great Depression. Lennie, who has a mild mental disability, is steadfastly faithful to his friend George, but he has a habit of getting into trouble. Their goal: to own an acre of land and a shack.

The book was later transformed into a Broadway play and three movies.