This week (February 6-12) in literary history – John Steinbeck’s
Of Mice and Men was published
(February 6, 1937); Charles Dickens’ Sketches
by Boz was published (February 7, 1836); Charles Dickens was born (February
7, 1812); Ann Radcliff died (February 7, 1823); Emile Zola was charged with
libel and brought to trial (February 7, 1898); John Grisham was born (February
8, 1955); Fyodor Dostoyevsky died (February 9, 1881); Brendan Behan was born
(February 9, 1923); Alex Haley died (February 10, 1992); Laura Ingalls Wilder
died (February 10, 1957); William Congreve was born (February 10, 1670);
Charles Lamb was born (February 10, 1775); Voltaire returned from exile
(February 11, 1778); Sylvia Plath committed suicide (February 11, 1963); Judy
Blume was born (February 12, 1938); Cotton Mather was born (February 12, 1663).
Highlighted Story of
the Week -
On February 6, 1937, John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, the story of the bond between two migrant workers,
was published. He adapted the book into a three-act play, which was produced
the same year. The story brought national attention to Steinbeck's work, which
had started to catch on in 1935 with the publication of his first successful
novel, Tortilla Flat. Steinbeck was
born and raised in the Salinas Valley, where his father was a county official
and his mother a former schoolteacher. A good student and president of his
senior class in high school, Steinbeck attended Stanford University intermittently
in the early 1920s. In 1925, he moved to New York City, where he worked as a journalist
while writing stories and novels. His first two books were not successful.
In 1930, he married Carol Henning, the first of his three
wives, and moved to Pacific Grove, California. Steinbeck's father gave the
couple a house and a small income while Steinbeck continued to write. His third
novel, Tortilla Flat (1935), was a
critical and financial success. In 1939, Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath, a novel tracing a
fictional Oklahoma family as they lose their family farm in the Depression and
move to California seeking a better life.
His work after World War II, including Cannery Row and The Pearl,
continued to offer social criticism but became more sentimental. Steinbeck
tried his hand at movie scripts in the 1940s, writing successful films like Forgotten Village (1941) and Viva Zapata (1952). He also took up the
serious study of marine biology and published a nonfiction book, The Sea of Cortez, in 1941. His 1962
nonfiction book, Travels with Charlie,
describes his travels across the United States in a camper truck with his
poodle, Charlie. Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in 1962 and died from heart
failure in New York in 1968. Steinbeck was buried at the Salinas Cemetery.
Check back every
Friday for a new installment of “This Week in Literary History.”
Michael Thomas Barry is the author of six nonfiction books
that includes the award winning Literary
Legends of the British Isles and the recently published America’s Literary Legends. Visit
Michael’s website www.michaelthomasbarry.com
for more information. These books can be purchased from Amazon through the
following links:
http://www.amazon.com/Americas-Literary-Legends-Burial-Writers/dp/0764347020/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1423243396&sr=8-1&keywords=michael+thomas+barry
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