Like Ernest Hemingway, several John Steinbeck Books have passed into American folklore, having also been immortalized on the cinema screen. His beginnings were lowly and he worked as a janitor and laborer while continously learning his chosen trade of Writer.
It was Steinbeck's contact with ordinary working folk that eventually brought him success, although his first three novels were not a critical or commercial success. (Cup of Gold, Pastures of Heaven and To A God Unknown). Receiving bete acclaim for 'Tortilla Flat', he went on to develop his recurrent theme of social injustice, writing 'In Dubious Battle' in 1936.
'Of Mice and Men', the story of two migrant peasant workers was warmly received, and the following 'Grapes of Wrath' was the greatest success of all John Steinbeck books and won him the Pulitzer Prize and also the National Book Award.
Although always making a social comment, John Steinbeck Books drew in the vibrant humor evident in tthe tough lives of itinerant farm laborers, and particularly immigrants. His book 'Cannery Row' was a playful romp amongst the low-life of post-war Monterey, whose depths were inhabited by a motlmey crue of Mexican immigrants living rough, Flora and her girls of the Bear Flag brothel, and Doc, a research scientist. The success of Cannery Row was followed with 'Sweet Thursday'.
The figure of of Doc himself was a very loosely disguised friend of Steinbecks' called Ed Ricketts, who was a marine biologist. Of some the several documentaries found in John Steinbeck books, 'The Log From The Sea of Cortez' was a study of the fauna around the Gulf of California. Even though more of a light hearted approach than East of Eden or Dubious Battle, social comment was always evident in Steinbeck's two novel portrait of life on Cannery Row, and often causes the reader to reflect on the nature of our human circumstances.
In later years, John Steinbeck books were much softer, and generally didn't carry the incisive comment about the richer classes and their abuse of poor labor. None of the later books achieved the critical acclaim of Grapes of Wrath, even East of Eden, which Steinneck declared 'the big one'. He also penned a few dubious wartime propoganda novels, such as 'The Moon Is Down', and interesting biographical travel documentaries such as Travels With Charley.
