Author John Steinbeck

Steinbeck graduated from Salinas High School in 1919, intermittently attended Stanford as an English major and left before achieving a degree. As a young man, he worked as a fruit picker and a ranch hand. Pursuing a writing career, he moved to New York City, and worked for the American newspaper. He was unable, however, to get his creative writing published, and returned to California. In 1929 his first work, Cup of Gold, was published but poorly received, as were his next two novels, The Pastures of Heaven and To a God Unknown. With the publication of Tortilla Flat in 1935, he finally achieved success as a writer. From that year on he published his work regularly and became a prolific writer, almost always focusing on the plight of the poor, the worker, the downtrodden, the individual fighting against forces beyond his control, but with which he struggled to the end.

The Grapes of Wrath, perhaps his greatest work, certainly his most famous, was published in 1939. Other major works included The Red Pony, Tortilla Flat, In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men, Cannery Row, The Pearl, East of Eden, The Winter of Our Discontent, and Travels With Cha

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ple who have been pushed into desperation by the harshness of nature and by the capitalist system, and they try to band together to fight the ravages of both forces. Steinbeck apparently felt that the structure he presents is the one which would most effectively appeal both to the hearts and the minds of the readers. He clearly believed that social, economic and political change was necessary, and that it was not enough to merely sympathize with suffering fictional characters. Perhaps he even meant the structure with alternating chapters to give the reader the same sense of being disoriented that the poor migrants felt as they traveled west away from their lost homes and farms. Perhaps Steinbeck was telling his readers, in effect, that they were not going to be merely "entertained" by a dramatic tale, but were instead going to be unsettled and disturbed by the interspersing of essay-like interruptions. Levant writes that the unusual structure can be viewed either as a great flaw in the work or as an appropriate structure for the novel's story and purpose. The first view holds that: The incoherent structure is the weakest point [of the book] --the story breaks in half, the nonorganic, editorializing interchapters force unearn
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Approximate Word count = 1372
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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