In the books, The Grapes of Wrath and The Pearl, John Steinbeck gives a voice to the impoverished and exploited classes who in his opinion have no chance of overcoming their destiny. He believes that the common man’s struggle is in trying to overcome their fate and escape the oppression caused by the wealthy and powerful capitalists. He attacks capitalism and the wealthy because he believes they are the root of society’s problems. Through John Steinbeck’s books he has changed the course of history and affected the lives of millions of readers. He has achieved many distinguished accomplishments, awards, and recognitions in his life. His books are considered classics of western literature and he has written some of the most influential and discussed books of his time.
John Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902 in Salinas, California. He grew up in a small rural settlement. As a child he would spend his summers working at nearby farms and migrant plantations. This is where he learned the harsh aspects of a migrant’s life and the darker side of the corrupt capitalists and wealthy landowners.He incorporates what he has learned,into his writings later in life.
After graduating Salinas High school in 1919, John Steinbeck went to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California to study English literature and writing. After going to his classes intermittently, he left Stanford University without a degree to pursue a career as a novelist. He then moved to New York to pursue this dream further. He chose New York because at the time New York was considered the literary center of the world. He would take odd jobs while trying to establish himself as a free-lance writer. When he failed to create a name for himself, he moved back to the West.
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In 1928, John Steinbeck took a job as a caretaker of a house in Lake Tahoe, where he met Carol Henning, who became his first wife. They got married in 1930, in Los Angeles, California. When his money ran out six months later he and Carol moved to Pacific Coast, California where his father owned a cottage. Living in his father’s house allowed him to spend all of his time writing because he did not have to worry about making an income to pay for rent. In this house he writes his first famous novel, Tortilla Flats. in 1930, John Steinbeck met Ed Ricketts. Ricketts was a marine biologist who became a close friend and mentor of John Steinbeck. John Steinbeck would take long boating voyages with Ricketts where he would take notes on the wildlife and pollution he saw in the ocean.
He used these findings to show his appreciation for the environment and all other living beings. “In his mind a new song had come, the Song of Evil, the music of the enemy, of any foe of the family, a savage secret, dangerous melody, and underneath, the Song of the Family cried plaintively.” This is the ideology John Steinbeck expressed in the book, The Pearl. His belief is that greed takes over a man. The second a man has money, greed takes over. The man’s friends turn into foes or oppositions. Money fills a human with venom just like a scorpion bite fills a man with venom. Money is the scorpion bite and greed is the venom.
John Steinbeck’s book, The Pearl, centers around a man named Kino whose son Coyotito gets bit by a scorpion. Kino’s wife, Juana tried to hire the local doctor but the doctor rejected them because they had no money. Kino and Juana went pearl diving to find a pearl to pay for the doctor. Juana did not pray for Coyotito’s recovery, she prayed for a pearl to pay the doctor to heal Coyotito. Kino finds the “pearl of the world,” but when Kino went to sell the pearl, the buyers tried cheating Kino.him Kino refused them, and because of this he is left to find a place to sell the his pearl. The doctor heard about Kino’s pearl and he came to try to save Coyotito. Coyotito is better but because the doctor wanted money, he poisoned Coyotito just to make it look like he can heal him.
The doctor asked Kino if Kino wanted the doctor to keep the pearl in his safe. Kino then glanced at the place where he hid the pearl. This is how the doctor knew where Kino hid the pearl. The doctor sent two people to go and steal the pearl from Kino, but he managed to fend them off. Still this was not the end. After the night the doctor came, Kino was constantly ambushed or attacked. Kino, Juana, and Coyotito manage to run away one night, but they realized that they were being followed by trackers sent by the foreigners. After trying to lose the trackers Kino knew that he could not escape the trackers. Kino decided that the only way to escape and sell the pearl was to kill the trackers. Kino waited until the night to confront the trackers.
Two of the trackers slept while the one with the gun stood guard. As Kino slowly crept up upon the trackers Juana moved to the edge of her hiding spot to see what would happen. Coyotito started to cry and the trackers thought it was a coyote so the trackers shot at it. Kino attacked the trackers and successfully killed all of them, but afterwards Kino knew something was wrong. Coyotito had been shot. Instead of continuing their journey to sell the pearl, Kino and Juana decided to go back to the town and destroy the pearl. They did this because they knew even if they sold the pearl and defeated their original destiny, there would still be new destiny and a new set of problems that came with it . They knew that they would still be oppressed and exploited.
In the John Steinbeck’s book, The Grapes of Wrath, he gives a voice to the exploited farmers. The Grapes of takes place in the early 1930’s during The Dust Bowl. At the time there were no social safety nets such as social security or medicare. The farmers had to work and pay for everything. They had to work from birth to death to be able to support their family. The book is about a family from Oklahoma, the Joads, who had been evicted from their farm in Oklahoma because the Dust Bowl destroyed their crops and they could not make enough money to pay for the rent.
The Joads set out to California because they had heard the rumors of good paying jobs there. When they arrived they realized that they had been misled. there were no good paying jobs and there were thousands of families fighting for the jobs that were available. The Joads, eventually found a job at a peach plantation which paid 5 cents per bucket of peaches The Joads found out that the farm was planning on cutting their wage in half, down to 2.5 cents per bucket. This wage was unbearable for the family and it was impossible to live on. This is shown in the following quote from the book, “What do you want us to do? We can’t take less share of the crop – we’re half starved now.
The kids are hungry all the time. We got no clothes, torn an’ ragged. If all the neighbors weren’t the same, we’d be ashamed to go to meeting.” Eventually the Joads find a government camp and a good employer. This shows that good things happen to good people, but there still were and still are thousands of family just like the Joads that had not found a home for themselves. In conclusion, John Steinbeck represented the exploited and impoverish classes in a time of crisis. It is debated whether he was a great novelist or just an average editorialist. some critics have claimed this. This makes him an even more influential novelist; because his books are so philosophically controversial, his work is consistently discussed by scholars and critics.
The problems he is representing in his books are talked about throughout history. It has been around eighty years since John Steinbeck’s books have been published and the problems he had talked about have for the most part have not been solved. The fact that we are still discussing his books, beliefs and, issues eighty years later proves how good a writer he really was. It is said that great literature never dies.John Steinbeck really was a great novelist and through his books he has changed the course of history.
