ovel . Among these writers, John Steinbeck was the most widely praised and successful.was born in California s Salinas Valley in 1902, the son of a county treasurer and a schoolteacher. Although he graduated from high school and spent some time at Stanford University, in between various jobs, he took more pride in the many jobs he held as a young man than in his formal education. After leaving the University he spent the next five years drifting across the country, reading, writing, and working at odd jobs. He worked as a hod carrier, fruit picker, apprentice painter, laboratory assistant, care-taker, surveyor, and writer. He wrote seventeen novels in all, in addition to stories, plays, film-scripts, and a great deal of journalism.had little success as a writer until 1935 when he published his third novel Tortilla Flat, a humorous story about a Mexican-American colony in Monterey. Steinbeck s first major success came in 1937 with Of Mice and Men, a short, best-selling novel which Steinbeck himself adapted into a Broadway play and motion picture. It is a tale of two drifters, farm-hands, migrants, George and the powerful but mentally handicapped Lennie whose dream of owning their farm ends in tragedy. Steinbeck portrayed their odd friendship with great sympathy and understanding. Steinbeck changed a pathetic situation into an affirmative acceptance of life s brutal conflicts, along with its possibilities for fellowship and courage.followed this success by joining some Oklahoma farmers known as Okies - who were embarking with great hope to California. Steinbeck lived and worked with them over the next two years, experiencing first-hand the disappointment and injustice they encountered. The result was his strongest and most enduring, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which follows the travails of a poor Oklahoma family that loses its farm during the Depression and travels to California to seek work. Family members suffer conditions of feudal oppression by rich landowners. The Grapes of Wrath tells of the Joad family and their forced migration from the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma to California, the region that promised work at decent wages and a chance to buy land. Once arrived, however, the Joads find only the exploitation and poverty of labor camps. Gradually they learn the real meaning of the term Okies - Oklahoma farmers, dispossessed of their land and forced to become migrant farmers in California , people who never even had a chance.Grapes of Wrath was an angry book that spoke out on behalf of the migrant workers. Steinbeck sharply criticized a system that bankrupted thousands of farmers and turned them from their own land, making them into paid help for the big growers. When the novel appeared, it was greeted with outbursts of praise and condemnation, and it became the most widely read of all the protest novels of the 1930 s. The book leaves the reader with the feeling which Steinbeck wanted to instill - that the poor can endure by helping one another, and perhaps also that they can expect no help from anyone else.Grapes of Wrath won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and established Steinbeck as one of the most highly regarded writers of his day. Steinbeck produced several more successful works during his later years, including Cannery Row (1945), The Pearl (1947), East of Eden (1952), and Winter of Our Discontent (1961). The end of his life, Steinbeck achieved a gratifying success with the award of the Nobel Prize in 1963 and with the publication in that year of Travels with Charley, a nostalgic account of a trip across America with his aged poodle Charley. But his reputation is grounded on those earlier novels which portray California as the real and symbolic land of American promise.creates vivid portraits of the landscape and demonstrates how people are shaped and manipulated by their environments. John Steinbeck s themes come from the poverty, desperation, and social injustice that he witnessed during the Great Depression of the 1930 s, a time when many people suffered under conditions beyond their control. His works reflect his belief in the need for social justice and his hope that people can learn from the suffering of others. Though many of his characters suffered tragic fates, they almost always managed to retain a sense of dignity throughout their struggles.
James Albert Michener
1907-1997Albert Michener was born on February 3, 1907. He never knew his real parents and was brought up by a Quaker widow in Penn...
