SteinbeckChildhoodExperiences

What were John Steinbeck’s childhood experiences that shaped his work? = = John Steinbeck’s willfulness became apparent when he was a freshman in high school. He decided to become a writer at this time. He would always compose stories and short pieces and send them to magazines. However, he was so terrified of getting a rejection letter or even an acceptance letter that he never put a return address on his submissions. He would search through magazines to see if the editors had published what he wrote. Sadly for Steinbeck, they never did because he never put his name on his pieces. Steinbeck would be disappointed when he never saw his works published (John 416-417). Because he never saw his works, he had doubts about becoming a writer, but in a way it also encouraged him to keep writing and keep trying to create something worth publishing. Keeping this in mind, it’s no surprise to learn that Steinbeck was extremely shy as an adolescent. As a self-defense mechanism, he would pretend to be proud and aloof. However, this actually made others dislike him. Things never improved for him in the future. As he grew older, he came to hate the community he had grown up in. The town of Salinas represented the embarrassment and rejection he had experienced during his childhood. This just added to the thought of Salinas being a narrow-minded, prejudiced, and hypocritical place. Salinas never thought much about Steinbeck either. Even when he became famous, his hometown spoke of him with hostility (Sanna 11). The fact that Steinbeck thought negatively about his hometown is very ironic because he uses his hometown in his stories. When he uses Salinas as the setting for his stories, he makes the setting just like the real place. He often creates the thought of Salinas being a place of poor but hard working people. At age 16, Steinbeck became seriously ill with pleural pneumonia. He couldn’t get better on his own and eventually a doctor had to break through his ribcage to drain the fluid from his lungs. There were doubts about whether or not he would live through the sickness. Steinbeck once wrote about his return to normal life, “It came time for me to learn to walk again. It had been nine weeks in bed, and my muscles had gone lax and the laziness of recovery had set in. When I was helped up, every nerve cried, and the wound in my side… pained horribly. He screamed, ‘I can’t do it! I can’t get up!’” For the rest of his life, he was haunted by the memory of his illness. He always feared catching pneumonia again, and he worried a tremendous amount about his own death (Sanna 11). In early May 1920, Steinbeck suffered an attack of acute appendicitis (Sanna 12). This attack didn’t help with Steinbeck’s fight through his fear of death. These illnesses that Steinbeck had to fight through as a teenager gave him the will and the drive to overcome adversities. He was emotionally strong and had the motivation to keep trying with his writing career. Steinbeck once said of his youth, “We were poor people with a heck of a lot of land which made us think we were rich people, even when we couldn’t buy food and were patched” (Owens 1). Steinbeck’s family never had a lot of wealth. When he became old enough to go to college, he had to work to pay for his education and sometimes took off one quarter to earn enough money to pay for the next quarter. He had a wide variety of jobs that included clerking in stores, working as a surveyor, and being a hand on a ranch. For a while he worked in an Oakland haberdashery, and then as a ranch hand again. After that, he dropped out of Stanford University to work as an assistant chemist in a sugar refinery. Another long period away from Stanford he spent as a member of a roadbuilding crew. There he did backbreaking work as he swung his pick ten hours a day in the autumn rains (O’Connor 23). Through all of his experiences of working while he was young, Steinbeck was able to get a view of life that others would never know about. He often takes this into his stories about characters just trying to make a living through many difficult jobs and possibly making it to the point of owning their own land. John Steinbeck went through many different obstacles growing up as a child. Whether it was certain personality characteristics, harsh job experiences, or terrible sicknesses, Steinbeck had a lot going on in his childhood that made him the person and the writer that he was. = = = = = =

= = = = = = = = = Works Cited = Sanna, Ellyn.“Biography of John Steinbeck.” //Bloom’s BioCritiques: John Steinbeck//. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003. 11-12. Print.

“John Ernst Steinbeck.” //Encycolpedia of World Biography//. Ed. Suzanne Michele Bourgoin and Paula Kay Byers. Vol. 14. New York: Gale Research, 1998. 416- 417. Print.

O’Connor, Richard. //John Steinbeck//. New York: McGraw- Hill Book Company, 1970. Print.

Owens, Louis. "John Steinbeck." //Discovering Authors//. Online ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003. //Student// //Resource Center// //- Silver//. Gale. Boyertown Area Sr. High School. 26 May. 2010 .

Josh M