John Steinbeck

Salinas, and the fields

He was born in Salinas, California, on 27 February 1902, the third of four children and the only son of John Ernst Steinbeck II and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck; the family had come to the United States a few generations back from Germany, England and Ireland. He worked his way through Stanford University without graduating, spending the breaks and summers in fields of sugar beet and other crops — the labour that later gave his novels their detail and their politics.

In 1925 he went to New York to establish himself as a freelance writer, failed at it within a few years, and went home to California. The first novel, Cup of Gold, appeared in August 1929; The Pastures of Heaven followed in 1932 and To a God Unknown in 1933, none of them selling. Recognition arrived with Tortilla Flat in May 1935, a run of comic stories about the paisanos of Monterey — the Spanish-speaking Californians of mixed Mexican, Indian and European descent who lived in the hills above that coastal town.

The California books

What followed the humour was harder. In Dubious Battle (October 1936) is set among migratory fruit pickers striking on a California plantation. Of Mice and Men (February 1937) reduced the same world to two men and one impossible plan. The Long Valley, a collection of stories, came in 1938, and The Grapes of Wrath in April 1939 — the Oklahoma tenant farmers who lose the land and become migrant workers in California, and the book that is generally taken as his best. It won both of the leading American book prizes of the day, the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, in 1940.

The novels are social novels about the economics of rural labour, and they carry, as the Nobel Foundation's own summary of him put it, a streak of worship of the soil — a romantic reverence for the land itself — that does not always sit comfortably beside their plain-spoken reporting of how the work and the money actually functioned. He married Carol Henning in January 1930, Gwyn Conger in New Orleans in the war years, and Elaine Anderson Scott in December 1950, who was his wife for the rest of his life.

Correspondent

From June to October 1943 he was in Europe and North Africa as a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, then one of the two great New York daily papers. In August and September 1947 he toured the Soviet Union with Robert Capa, the Hungarian-born photographer whose pictures of the Spanish Civil War and the Normandy landings had made him the most famous war photographer alive. The reporting habit never left him: he kept going out to look at things and writing down what he saw, and it eventually produced both the Paris columns and, at the end, Travels with Charley.

East of Eden, the long novel of two families in his own Salinas Valley that he considered his most ambitious book, was published in 1952. It was his most recent novel when he arrived in Paris two years later.

The summer at 1 avenue de Marigny

In 1954 the Steinbecks took a house at 1 avenue de Marigny, in the 8th arrondissement — the wealthy district on the Right Bank around the Champs-Élysées — and stayed for the summer. He was fifty-two, world-famous, and — unusually for an American novelist in Paris — working for a French newspaper rather than writing about the city for readers at home. Le Figaro, one of the oldest and largest of the Paris dailies, treated him as a regular contributor, a frequent interviewee and a favourite American, and he wrote for the paper through the season.

On 31 July 1954 the paper printed "Les Puces sympathiques" — French for "The Amiable Fleas" — a whimsically satirical tale about Monsieur Amité, a nervous French chef, and Apollo, his temperamental cat. It appeared in French, for French readers, and then effectively vanished. The English text Steinbeck actually typed sat unpublished among his papers at the University of Texas until Andrew Gulli, the editor of The Strand Magazine, an American quarterly that specialises in printing rediscovered fiction, found it and printed it in 2019, sixty-five years after the story had been read in Paris.

The Paris writing accumulated into a book that exists only in French: Un Américain à New York et à Paris — 'An American in New York and in Paris' — published in 1956 in Jean-François Rozan's translation and catalogued under that title by the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the French national library. So one of Steinbeck's books sits on the shelves of a national library in a language he did not write it in, and has never been published in the language he did.

There is an unresolved question attached to the same address. The American journalist Christopher Dickey, writing about that summer, noted the daily arrival at the house of a man from the United States embassy — the American government's mission in Paris — carrying an attaché case, the slim leather document case of the diplomatic trade, and asked whether Steinbeck was serving as an informant for the Central Intelligence Agency, the American foreign intelligence service, while he lived there. The question has been raised and not settled: no published document either confirms it or rules it out.

Charley, and the Nobel

The Winter of Our Discontent appeared in 1961. The following year he published Travels with Charley, the account of a three-month circuit of forty American states made in a camper truck with Charley, his poodle, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the international prize given each year to one writer for a body of work — "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception", as the citation put it. He died in New York City on 20 December 1968, of arteriosclerosis, the hardening of the arteries.