John Steinbeck, born in Salinas, California, in 1902, grew
up in a fertile agricultural valley, about 25 miles from the
Pacific Coast. Both the valley and the coast would serve as
settings for some of his best fiction. 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.
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). After 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). Popular success and financial security came
only with Tortilla Flat (1935), stories about Monterey’s
paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck
changed courses regularly. 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). The Grapes of Wrath won both
the National Book Award and the Pulitzer
Prize in 1939.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.
Johnson. Steinbeck died in New York in 1968. Today, more than 30
years after his death, he remains one of America's greatest writers
and cultural figures.
Rosa Harvan Kline was a film producer and photographer. She
produced the documentary films Crisis (1939) and The
Forgotten Village (1941).
Alexander Hackensmid (1907–2004) was a film director and
cinematographer best known for Crisis (1939), The Forgotten Village
(1941), and Meshes in the Afternoon (1946).
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