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John Steinbeck Accomplishments

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John Emst Steinbeck was bom on Febmary 27, 1902, in Salinas,
Califomia. The time and place of his birth are important because
Steinbeck matured as an artist in his early thirties and during the darkest days of the Depression, and his most important fictions are set in his beloved Salinas Valley. In one sense, Steinbeck's location in time and place may have made him a particularly American artist. Bom just after the closing of the frontier, Steinbeck grew up with a fmstrated modem
America and witnessed the most notable failure of the American
Dream with the Great Depression. He was a writer who inherited the great tradition of the American Renaissance of the nineteenth century and who was forced to reshape it in terms of the historical and literary …show more content…

In 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor changed the direction of American culture and of John Steinbeck's literary development.
During the war years, Steinbeck seemed to be in a holding pattem, trying to adjust to his phenomenal success while absorbing the cataclysmic events around him. His career stalled for many reasons. He left the
Califomia subjects and realistic style of his finest novels, and he was unable to come to terms with a world at war, though he served for a few months as a frontline news correspondent. Personal developments in
Steinbeck's life paralleled these literary ones. He divorced his first wife and married Gwyndolyn Conger, a young Hollywood starlet; no doubt she influenced his decision to move from Califomia to New York.
Steinbeck began to write with an eye on Broadway and Hollywood.
Steinbeck was forty-three years old when World War II ended in 1945;
16 Critical Insights he died in 1968 at the age of sixty-six. Over those twenty-three years, he was extremely productive and won considerable acclaim—most notably, the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. Yet the most important part …show more content…

Like his first divorce, this one was bitter and expensive. In the same year, his mentor,
Ed Ricketts, was killed in a car accident. Steinbeck traveled extensively, devofing himself to film and nonfiction projects. In 1950, he married Elaine Scott, establishing a supportive relationship that allowed him to finish his epic Salinas Valley novel East of Eden.
Steinbeck tried again and again to write his way back to the artistic success of his earlier years, notably in The Wayward Bus, but his commercial success kept getting in the way. East of Eden, his major postwar novel, was an attempt at another Califomia epic to match the grandeur of The Grapes of Wrath. Although the book was a blockbuster best seller, it was an artistic and critical failure. Steinbeck himself seemed to recognize his own decline, and in his last years he virtually abandoned ficfion for joumalism.
Of his last novels, only The Winter of Our Discontent transcends mere entertainment, and it does not have the literary stmcture necessary to support its serious themes. Despite the popularity of Steinbeck's nonfiction, such as Travels with Charley, despite awards such as the Nobel Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and despite

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