John Steinbeck Net Worth

Background and career

John Ernst Steinbeck ( STYNE-bek; February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) was an American writer and novelist. He won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception". He has been called "a giant of American letters". One of the most widely read authors of the 20th century, he was also an independent journalist and war correspondent during World War II and the Vietnam War.

During his writing career, he authored 33 books, with one book coauthored alongside Edward Ricketts, including 16 novels, 6 non-fiction books, and 2 collections of short stories. He is widely known for the comic novels Tortilla Flat (1935) and Cannery Row (1945), the epic East of Eden (1952), and the novellas The Red Pony (1933) and Of Mice and Men (1937). The Pulitzer Prize–winning The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is considered Steinbeck's masterpiece and part of the American literary canon. By the 75th anniversary of its publishing date, it had sold 14 million copies.

Much of Steinbeck's work employs settings in his native central California, particularly in the Salinas Valley and the California Coast Ranges region. His works frequently explored the themes of fate and injustice, especially as applied to downtrodden or everyman protagonists. He was awarded with the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 and was nominated for three Academy Awards.

Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California. He was of German, English, and Irish descent. Johann Adolf Großsteinbeck (1828–1913), Steinbeck's paternal grandfather, was a founder of Mount Hope, a short-lived farming colony in Palestine that disbanded after Arab attackers killed his brother and raped his brother's wife and mother-in-law. He arrived in the United States in 1858, shortening the family name to Steinbeck. The family farm in Heiligenhaus, Mettmann, Germany, is still named "Großsteinbeck".

His father, John Ernst Steinbeck (1862–1935), served as Monterey County treasurer. John's mother, Olive "Ollie" Hamilton (1867–1934), met Steinbeck’s father in King City, California, in the 1890s where his father became one of town’s first residents having moved there to work as the first station agent and manager for the Sperry Flour Mill and where his mother worked as a local schoolteacher, sharing the same passion as Steinbeck for literature, his grandfather Samuel Hamilton was born in Ballykelly, County Londonderry, Ireland (then Ulster), and emigrated to the United States arriving in California, where he lived on a ranch eight miles east of King City. The character Samuel Hamilton in his grandson's novel East of Eden is based on him. The Steinbecks were members of the Episcopal Church, although Steinbeck later became agnostic. Steinbeck lived in the Salinas Valley, about 25 miles from the Pacific Coast. Both valley and coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. He spent his summers working on nearby ranches including the Post Ranch in Big Sur. He later labored with migrant workers on Spreckels sugar beet farms. There he learned of the harsher aspects of the migrant life and the darker side of human nature, which supplied him with material expressed in Of Mice and Men. He explored his surroundings, walking across local forests, fields, and farms. While working at Spreckels Sugar Company, he sometimes worked in their laboratory, which gave him time to write. He had considerable mechanical aptitude and fondness for repairing things he owned.

Steinbeck graduated from Salinas High School in 1919 and went on to study English literature at Stanford University near Palo Alto, leaving without a degree in 1925. He traveled to New York City where he took odd jobs while trying to write. When he failed to publish his work, he returned to California and worked in 1928 as a tour guide and caretaker at Lake Tahoe, where he met Carol Henning, his first wife. They married in January 1930 in Los Angeles, where, with friends, he attempted to make money by manufacturing plaster mannequins.

When their money ran out six months later due to a slow market, Steinbeck and Carol moved back to Pacific Grove, California, to a cottage owned by his father, on the Monterey Peninsula a few blocks outside the Monterey city limits. The elder Steinbecks gave John free housing, paper for his manuscripts, and from 1928, loans that allowed him to write without looking for work. During the Great Depression, Steinbeck bought a small boat, and later claimed that he was able to live on the fish and crabs that he gathered from the sea, and fresh vegetables from his garden and local farms. When those sources failed, Steinbeck and his wife accepted welfare, and on rare occasions, stole bacon from the local produce market. Whatever food they had, they shared with their friends. Carol became the model for Mary Talbot in Steinbeck's novel Cannery Row.

In 1930, Steinbeck met the marine biologist Ed Ricketts in Monterey, California, who became a close friend and mentor to Steinbeck during the following decade, teaching him a great deal about philosophy and biology. Ricketts was very quiet yet likable, with an encyclopedic knowledge of diverse subjects, and became a focus of Steinbeck's attention. Ricketts operated a biological lab on the coast of Monterey, selling biological samples of small animals, fish, rays, starfish, turtles, and other marine forms to schools and colleges. Between 1930 and 1936, Steinbeck and Ricketts became close friends, and Steinbeck's wife Carol began working at the lab as secretary-bookkeeper. Steinbeck helped on an informal basis. They formed a common bond based on their love of music and art, and Steinbeck learned biology and Ricketts's ecological philosophy. When Steinbeck became emotionally upset, Ricketts sometimes played music for him.

Steinbeck's first novel, Cup of Gold, was published in 1929. In 1930, Steinbeck wrote a werewolf murder mystery, Murder at Full Moon, that has never been published because Steinbeck considered it unworthy of publication. The Pastures of Heaven was published in 1932, and consisted of twelve interconnected stories set in Corral de Tierra which was discovered by a Spanish corporal who was chasing runaway Indian slaves. To a God Unknown was published in 1933.

Steinbeck achieved his first critical success when Tortilla Flat was published in 1935. Before Tortilla Flat was published, Steinbeck was an obscure writer "with little success." The novel was set in post-war Monterey, California and won the California Commonwealth Club's gold medal. In the New York Times, the book was described as "a sunny, warmhearted , amoral and slightly scandalous chronicle." The novel portrays the adventures of a group of young men living in Monterey after World War I, just before U.S. prohibition. They are portrayed in ironic comparison to mythic knights on a quest and reject many social mores of American society in enjoyment of a dissolute life devoted to wine, lust, camaraderie and petty theft. Tortilla Flat was adapted as a 1942 film of the same name, starring Spencer Tracy, Hedy Lamarr and John Garfield, a friend of Steinbeck. With some of the proceeds, he built a summer ranch-home in Los Gatos, California.

Steinbeck began to write a series of "California novels" and Dust Bowl fiction, set among common people during the Great Depression. These included In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. He also wrote an article series called The Harvest Gypsies for the San Francisco News about the plight of the migrant worker.

Of Mice and Men was a novella about the dreams of two migrant agricultural laborers in California. It was published in 1937 to critical acclaim. Steinbeck's 1962 Nobel Prize citation called it a "little masterpiece." Steinbeck, on vacations to Mexico, witnessed sold-out theater troupes performing for poor and illiterate workers, and wrote Of Mice and Men with a stage play in mind.

The stage production was a hit , starring Wallace Ford as George and Broderick Crawford as George's companion, the mentally childlike, but physically powerful itinerant farmhand Lennie. Steinbeck refused to travel from his home in California to attend any performance of the play during its New York run, telling director George S. Kaufman that the play as it existed in his own mind was "perfect" and that anything presented on stage would only be a disappointment. Steinbeck wrote two more stage plays (The Moon Is Down and Burning Bright).

Of Mice and Men was also adapted as a 1939 Hollywood film, with Lon Chaney Jr. as Lennie and Burgess Meredith as George. Chaney had also filled the role in the Los Angeles stage production. Meredith and Steinbeck became close friends for the next two decades. Another film based on the novella was made in 1992 starring Gary Sinise as George and John Malkovich as Lennie.

In August 1936, the San Francisco News asked Steinbeck to personally interview multiple families in the impoverished Hoovervilles of the San Joaquin Valley. As Steinbeck visited the slums that hugged the highways across the Central Valley, he was harrowed by what he saw. In 1939, Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath based on his observations and experiences. The novel is commonly considered to be his greatest work. According to The New York Times, it was the best-selling book of 1939, and 430,000 copies had been printed by February 1940. In that month, it won the National Book Award, favorite fiction book of 1939, voted by members of the American Booksellers Association. Later that year, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was adapted as a film directed by John Ford, starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad; Fonda was nominated for the best actor Academy Award.

Grapes of Wrath reflects Steinbeck's New Deal political views, negative portrayal of aspects of capitalism, and sympathy for the plight of workers, which led to backlash against him, especially in his hometown of Salinas. Steinbeck received so many threats that he purchased a handgun for his safety. Claiming the book was obscene and misrepresented the county, the Kern County Board of Supervisors banned the book from the county's public schools and libraries in August 1939. This ban lasted until January 1941.

Of the controversy, Steinbeck wrote, "The vilification of me out here from the large landowners and bankers is pretty bad. The latest is a rumor started by them that the Okies hate me and have threatened to kill me for lying about them. I'm frightened at the rolling might of this damned thing. It is completely out of hand; I mean a kind of hysteria about the book is growing that is not healthy."

The then first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a fan of Of Mice and Men, defended Steinbeck's work in her nationally syndicated newspaper column, "My Day." She described the novel as "an unforgettable experience in reading... [it] both repels and attracts you. The horrors of the picture, so well drawn, make you dread sometimes to begin the next chapter, and yet you cannot lay the book down or even skip a page." After visiting California labor camps in 1940, she was asked if she believed the novel was exaggerated. Roosevelt responded, "I have never believed that The Grapes of Wrath was exaggerated."

In the 1930s and 1940s, Ed Ricketts strongly influenced Steinbeck's writing. Steinbeck frequently took small trips with Ricketts along the California coast to give himself time off from his writing and to collect biological specimens, which Ricketts sold for a living. Their coauthored book, Sea of Cortez (December 1941), about a collecting expedition to the Gulf of California in 1940, which was part travelogue and part natural history, published just as the U.S. entered World War II, never found an audience and did not sell well. However, in 1951, Steinbeck republished the narrative portion of the book as The Log from the Sea of Cortez, under his name only (though Ricketts had written some of it). This work remains in print today.