Blog Post #1 

Focus on Author

John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California on Feb. 27, 1902. After reading his Wikipedia page on his early life, he sounds like a person who always knew what he wanted in life but probably just wasn’t ready until his first book was published in 1929. John dropped out of Stanford University, and decided to live in New York where he found work as a construction worker and Newspaper reporter. He never managed to get his work published in NY, and scurried back to California, here he now worked as a caretaker in Lake Tahoe, things were going better and not only did he publish his first book, Cup of Gold (1929), he also met his first wife Carol Henning.

“According to biography.com, Of mice and Men (1937) is supposed to be a work by John with a more serious tone to it”. So I am not expecting a lot of laughter while reading.

Anyways, John’s most ambitious novel of all time is The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which we have looked at in class, where he talks about a family leaving Oklahoma during the depression, looking for the Promised Land (California). This book actually earned Steinbeck the Pulitzer prize, and in 1962 John received the Nobel Prize for Literature for his “realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception"

I think it is always interesting to read about people who know exactly what they want in life, just like John, who already knew at the age of 14 that he wanted to be an author. John also experienced World War 1 and 2, which is always crazy to think about for our generation!

I definitely feel more excited reading Of mice and men, now that I know more about the Author. I think the author’s background often plays a big role for how to interpret a book and for the understanding of it. John Steinbeck was a writer during the great depression, which reflected on some of the books he wrote.