John Steinbeck

1
John Steinbeck

• An introduction to his life
• and his novel
• Of Mice and Men

2
Steinbecks Life

• He was born in 1902 in Salinas, CA.
• He grew up and spent most of his adult life
  there.
• He attended Stanford University from 1920-1925.
• As a young man, he took a series of jobs so he
  could find out how working people actually live.

3
Steinbecks Life

• During this time, he worked on a ranch. This
  experience became the basis for Of Mice and Men.
• His first novel was published in 1929.
• He won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1940 for
  The Grapes of Wrath.

4
Steinbecks Life

• In 1962 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
• He was a private person in life and shunned
  publicity.
• He died in New York City on December 20, 1968 and
  is buried in Salinas, CA.

5
Steinbecks Novels

• His novels deal with the struggles of ordinary
  people.
• His work was controversial because of his support
  for the underprivileged.
• In the 1930s, tension between state agribusiness
  and the underpaid, overworked laborer was high.

6
Steinbecks Novels

• Between 1935 and 1940 more than 350,000 people
  left the Dust Bowl for California.
• The West was viewed as the promised land, a place
  to start a new life.
• Steinbecks trilogy, In Dubious Battle, Of Mice
  and Men and Grapes of Wrath deals with
  agricultural labor.

7
Of Mice and Men

• The novel covers a three- day period in the lives
  of George and Lennie, the main characters.
• The novel takes place in the Salinas Valley, near
  Soledad, CA. in the 1930s.
• Soledad is about 80 miles from San Francisco.

8
Of Mice and Men

• George and Lennie are itinerate workers.
• They buck barly or lift grain bags
  backbreaking, unskilled labor.
• The ranch represents a world of uneducated,
  low-class people trying, with little success, to
  change their lives.

9
Of Mice and Men

• The novel is written with the structure of a
  play.
• Steinbeck calls it neither a novel nor a play
  but it is a kind of playable novel.

10
Of Mice and Men

• The following slides are pictures that were
  taken during the Great Depression. Many depict
  migrant workers from Oklahoma working and living
  in California. These are images of the real
  life that inspired Steinbeck to write about the
  common man.

11
A family on their way from the Dust Bowl to
California.
12
Dust piled against an abandoned farm.
13
Dust Bowl farm
14
Migrant mother
15
Migrant worker
16
School recess for migrant children