Outside Reading Blog #4: John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck, a great American author in his time, lived in the years 1902-1968. In his lifetime, he wrote a total of 27 books, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Grapes of Wrath and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. In the interval of his life, he experienced much poverty and death, and many of these things were what influenced him in his writing. The four major events which occurred in his time are World World I, The Great Depression, World War II, and the Vietnam War. His writings were based mostly on the time of the Depression, like the Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, and Tortilla Flat, but his novel about the Norwegian resistance of the Nazis during World War II, the Moon is Down, was such a hit that it was immediately made into a movie. During the 30's and 40's, much of his work was based on biologist Ed Ricketts, a friend who he traveled with to the Californian coast in order to collect specimens. Unfortunately, this ended after Ricketts' untimely death in 1941. Ultimately, it has been said that much of Steinbeck's work was influenced by Darwin's "theory of evolution", which transfers to the idea of realism. Steinbeck's books and ideas were exclusively based off of this idea of "realism" and its outgrowth, naturalism, which had a sordid and truthful aspect to the world. Steinbeck didn't want to write about god or the miracles he can create; in its place, he wrote about the brutal, definite truth.