JOHN STEINBECK

“A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike.  An all plans, safeguards, policies and coercion are fruitless.  We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us."
– John Steinbeck
By Nobel Foundation [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

ABOUT JOHN STEINBECK

John Steinbeck (1902-1968) was a renowned American author best known for the masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath (1939), the epic Pulitzer Prize winning novel about a desperate family of Oklahoma farmers forced to migrate to California to find work.  He was born in Salinas, California and lived through the Great Depression, working on nearby ranches.  Much of his writing revolves around the unfair challenges faced by marginalized everyday workers using his home state as a setting, like with his brilliant short story Of Mice and Men and with his epic mlti-generational novel East of Eden (1952).  While many of Steinbeck’s most popular books are fiction, he loved to travel and to write about travel.  One of our favorite all-time travel books is the story of his roadtrip across America in a camper van with his dog, called Travels with Charley (1962).  He also wrote a travelogue about a trip he took collecting marine specimens in Mexico, called The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951).  Steinbeck won the 1962 Novel Prize for Literature.

A5 RECOMMENDATIONS - JOHN STEINBECK BOOKS

OTHER BOOKS BY JOHN STEINBECK

John Steinbeck is of course one of America's greatest writers, an author of twenty-seven books and a Nobel Prize winner for Literature.  His best known includes The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Cannery Row (1945), Of Mice and Men (1937), East of Eden (1952), The Pearl (1947), Tortilla Flat (1935), and The Red Pony (1933).

GREAT QUOTES FROM JOHN STEINBECK

“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age.  In middle age I was assured greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage.  In other words, once a bum always a bum.  I fear this disease incurable.”
- John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

"I know people who are so immersed in road maps that they never see the countryside they pass through, and others who, having traced a route, are held to it as though held by flanged wheels to rails."

“And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.”

“A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it."

INTERESTING LINKS:

  • One of the best sources of information on this legendary writer is the National Steinbeck Center, a website dedicated to his life and work and a non-profit organization in Salinas, CA that can be visited.
  • There are a number of solid biographies on John Steinbeck, but one of the best (besides of course his own travelogue memoir Travels with Charley) is Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, a collection of personal letters to friends that act as a sort of autobiography. 

JOHN STEINBECK'S NOBEL PRIZE SPEECH