Of Mice and Men

John Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California. He was of German-Irish descent. In 1919, he left to study English literature and journalism at Stanford University in San Francisco, yet he didn’t particularly enjoy student life. He found the odd jobs with which he paid for college much more relevant. Like many of the characters in his later novels, he worked on farms, in construction and in factories. In 1925, he dropped out and went to New York to establish himself as a writer but soon after returned to California. His first three novels were largely ignored, before he managed his literary breakthrough with the picaresque novel Tortilla Flat. Steinbeck then worked as a journalist, describing the fate of migrant workers during the Great Depression. His impressions from this time shaped the two novels Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The latter became an international success and made Steinbeck the best-known, most talked about American author at the time. Yet conservatives treated him with increasing hostility, tarring him as a communist for his unveiled critique of capitalism. During World War II, he covered Italy as a war reporter and subsequently traveled throughout Europe, North Africa and Russia. With his 1952 novel East of Eden, he landed another great commercial success. Steinbeck, who by now had been married for the third time, hit the road again with his poodle Charley, traveling the United States in a converted truck. He wrote an article series about his experience that was published in the 1962 book, Travels with Charley. That same year, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died of heart failure on December 20, 1968, in New York City.