John Steinbeck was one of the leading American novelists of this century and was especially noted for his portrayals of the people and events in California labor history in this century. In many of his best works, California serves almost as another character.
Steinbeck grew up in California. His grandparents on both sides had settled in the region in the mid-1800s. The family settled in the area of Salinas, and at the turn of the century this area was a typical American small town, with a population of some 3,000. Steinbeck would reflect the experience of his grandparents in his novels To a God Unknown and East of Eden, and he would use Salinas as the setting of East of Eden. John was born in 1902. Both his parents considered cultural influences to be important for their children, and they would travel to train several times a year to San Francisco to see plays and attend concerts. John was also exposed to literature at an early age:
As the parents were well educated and loved books, it was the custom after dinner for everyone to gather in the sitting room and listen to the father and mother take turns reading the popular Alice books, adventure stories by Robert Louis Stevenson, or tales from Greek and Roman mythology (McCarthy 5).
The boy's family life was not perfect, thought, and there were family disagreements and arguments form time to time. John did not live a bookish or sheltered life and was usually the leader among the points in his part of town, which would often get him into trouble (McCarthy 5). Steinbeck's California fiction is largely from the area he encountered as a boy and into young manhood, all in the Monterey-Salinas area, Watsonville to the north, and the San Joaquin Valley east of the Gabilan Mountains. Four of his novels and several short stories are set in this area (McCarthy 7).
Steinbeck had a somewhat checkered career at Stanford University, and he withdrew after his second year. H...