The Literary Impact Of John Steinbeck

Tessa Williamson

Mrs. Anderson

English 9H

24 April 2023

The Literary Impact of John Steinbeck (check at the end) Storytelling is a way to capture history and give a voice to those who are held silent. John Steinbeck was an author who perfectly captured the depth and details of real historic problems and economic realities. Although his life may have seemed insignificant as a child, Steinbeck managed to create literary masterpieces as an adult, even while balancing marriages and other jobs. John Steinbeck provides us a sense of history and perspective on critical realities in society that allowed other authors to speak truth to many topics that were previously avoided. Stiendbeck’s early life may seem bleak compared to his well-known

This pain is inevitable and at some point in our lives we all must face it. Ed Ricketts was a marine biologist and author. He wrote a world-famous marine biology text in collaboration with Jack Clavin. The text was called Between Pacific Tides. Ricketts lived in Pacific Grove and Monterey, CA. He studied the creatures along the Pacific coast including “intertidal zone animals and collected specimens for Universities and others under his company name Pacific Biological Laboratories located on Monterey’s Cannery Row”. Ed Ricketts and John Stienbeck met at a cottage in Carmel in October of 1930. “Steinbeck [had] planned to sit out the Great Depression in his father’s cottage [with his new bride, Carol Henning]. This move set the stage for his inevitable meeting with Ed Ricketts”. The two quickly became friends over their shared interest in marine biology. Although Ricketts was a dear friend, he was also a mentor to Stienbeck as he was an inspiration to the writer in the field of science and philosophy. Ed Ricketts inspired John Stienbeck to write the novel Cannery Row. In the novel, the character “Doc” was influenced by Ricketts although Ed Ricketts “wasn’t called Doc in real life”. The Pacific Biological Laboratories is directly used in the book as well, and is a setting to many important events throughout the story. The two bonded further as they

He portrayed this through his love, through his writing, and through the lessons in his stories. John Steinbeck’s third love was Elaine Anderson Steinbeck. She “was one of the first women to become a Broadway stage manager… Mrs. Steinbeck was active in the theater before her marriage to Mr. Steinbeck in 1950 and remained so after his death in 1968”. In around July, 1949, Steinbeck met his soon-to-be bride. She was “a stage manager from Texas[. At the time,] Elaine Scott was still married to actor Zachary Scott when she started an affair with John Steinbeck”. The two were married only a week after Anderson and Scott’s divorce was finalized. John Steinbeck and Elain Anderson were extraordinarily close. They would write to each other even while Anderson was still married to another man. Their bond lasted for 18 years, until Elain Anderson was widowed in 1968. Only two years after their marriage, on September 19, 1952, John Steinbeck published one of his greatest novels, East of Eden. His original plan “was to write the book itself on the right page, and a letter to his two young sons from a previous marriage, ages four and six, on the left”. Although the book does not contain this letter in the end, it is still a great representation of Steinbeck's family and young life. The book is set in his homeland, the fertile Salinas Valley. The “sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two