John Steinbeck was born in
Salinas, California, in 1902. He was the
third of four children and the only son of John Steinbeck, Sr. and
Olive Hamilton Steinbeck. Growing up in a rural valley near the
Pacific coast, Steinbeck was an intense reader, and both his father,
a local government official, and his mother, a former schoolteacher,
encouraged his literary pursuits. In 1919 he
graduated from Salinas High School and matriculated at Stanford
University, where he studied literature and writing.
In 1925, without a degree, Steinbeck
left Stanford to pursue work as a reporter in New York City. He
returned to California the following year, supporting his endeavors
at writing with a steady income from manual labor. Over the next
several years his literary career gained momentum with the publication
of his first novels. Although his first three—Cup of Gold, The
Pastures of Heaven, and To a God Unknown—were
critical and commercial failures, he achieved major success in 1935 with
the publication of Tortilla Flat, a collection
of stories about the ethnic working poor in California. During this
time, Steinbeck began to gain recognition from critics for his short
stories.
Steinbeck’s extensive travels in the 1930s
partly inspired two of his finest works, Of Mice and Men, in 1937,
and The Grapes of Wrath, in 1939.
Both novels, fictional portraits of the western United States during
the Great Depression, are still read widely. Steinbeck received
the Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath in 1940.
Steinbeck’s simple, touching novella The Pearl originally appeared
in the magazine Woman’s Home Companion in 1945 under
the title “The Pearl of the World.” The story explores the destructive
effect of colonial capitalism on the simple piety of a traditional
native culture. Set in a Mexican Indian village on the Baja Peninsula
around the turn of the century, the novella tells the story of Kino,
an Indian pearl diver who discovers a massive, beautiful, and extremely
valuable pearl. The pearl fills Kino with a new desire to abandon
his simple, idyllic life in favor of dreams of material and social
advancement, dreams that run headlong into the oppressive resistance
of the Spanish colonial powers that top the social hierarchy of
Kino’s world.
While less complex than Steinbeck’s other works, The
Pearl ranks among his most popular, and it is certainly
one of his most accessible. The novella was originally conceived
as a film project (and was in fact made into a motion picture in 1948);
it features a simple, visually evocative style that in many ways
recalls the narrative flow of a film. Additionally, The
Pearl’s simple prose style echoes the traditional style
of a moral parable, particularly the biblical parables of Jesus.
The story clearly owes a great deal to the biblical story of the
pearl of great price, and to a certain extent the familiar rhythms
and easily understandable moral lessons of the novella help to explain
its continuing power and its long-standing popularity.
The Pearl is not among Steinbeck’s most
critically acclaimed works, but it has exerted a certain amount
of influence in American literature. Its evocation of natural beauty
and its use of the short, simple parable form may have influenced
Ernest Hemingway in writing The Old Man and the Sea (1952).
Because of its overwhelming popularity, Steinbeck reissued The
Pearl as a single volume in 1947,
and it has enjoyed a healthy readership ever since. Other widely
read Steinbeck titles include Cannery Row and The
Red Pony, both published in 1945, East
of Eden (1952), and the unique travelogue Travels
with Charley (1962).
Steinbeck was a prolific and popular writer, but few
consider him to be an American writer of the absolute first rank.
Whereas most of Steinbeck’s contemporaries—Hemingway and William
Faulkner, for example—wrote in clear and consistent styles, making
it easy to identify their artistry, Steinbeck never stuck with one
style, and his choice of narrative form varied greatly from work
to work. Nevertheless, Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for literature
in 1962, and although the quality of his
writing suffered a precipitous drop in his final years, he left
behind a body of work that marks him as a significant twentieth-century
American voice.
