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Steinbeck called these vales "the pastures of heaven" they're endowed with a beauty that is variously subtle and spectacular but usually not visible from a speeding automobile. In fact, a large measure of California's ambiguous past is accessible not far off the main highway, in the upper reaches of Steinbeck's Salinas Valley and the smaller valleys that parallel or intersect it. Highway 101 at any given season belong to tourists hurling themselves toward major destinations, taking a quick inland route between the San Francisco-Monterey Bay region and the central coast. Visitors will probably always come to California for the vistas and the pastel cities. By now much of the place's past has been brutally subsumed in her promise a state that had 6 million residents when some of her middle-aged citizens were born has 30 million today. The Santa Lucias looked romantic, mist-shrouded and filled with wild promise.Ĭalifornia's golden days and scented nights have always suggested a kind of flawed paradise, a garden complete with resident serpents. The eastward Gabilans seemed to me subjected mountains, dulled with the piety of farmers and the misery of their hired labor. When I first saw the same ranges 30 years ago, I felt differently. The Santa Lucias stood up against the sky to the west and kept the valley from the open sea, and they were dark and brooding - unfriendly and dangerous." They were beckoning mountains with a brown grass love.
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"I remember that the Gabilan Mountains to the east of the valley were light gay mountains full of sun and loveliness and a kind of invitation, so that you wanted to climb into their warm foothills almost as you want to climb into the lap of a beloved mother. Today, more than thirty years after his death, he remains one of America's greatest writers and cultural figures.IN THE OPENING PAGES OF HIS 1952 NOVEL, "East of Eden," John Steinbeck recalled the Salinas Valley of his childhood, 50 years before. Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, and, in 1964, he was presented with the United States Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B.
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Later books include Sweet Thursday (1954), The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957), Once There Was a War (1958), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), America and Americans (1966), and the posthumously published Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969), Viva Zapata! (1975), The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976), and Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (1989). The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he traveled widely. Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (1948), another experimental drama, Burning Bright (1950), and The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951) preceded publication of the monumental East of Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family’s history. He devoted his services to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play-novelette The Moon is Down (1942).
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The Grapes of Wrath won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1939.Įarly in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with The Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious student of marine biology with Sea of Cortez (1941). Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the California laboring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the book considered by many his finest, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Popular success and financial security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935), stories about Monterey’s paisanos. During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929).Īfter marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two California books, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later collected in The Long Valley (1938). In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. Both the valley and the coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. John Steinbeck, born in Salinas, California, in 1902, grew up in a fertile agricultural valley, about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast.