59 Fun Facts About John Steinbeck

In which California town was John Steinbeck born in 1902?

Salinas: he was born in a bedroom of the family's Victorian house on Central Avenue, which volunteers later turned into a lunch restaurant two blocks from the National Steinbeck Center.

Steinbeck's German grandfather helped run Mount Hope, an 1850s Christian farm meant to teach Jews agriculture, in which region?

Palestine, then under Ottoman rule: the farm outside Jaffa was abandoned after an 1858 raid in which his grandfather's brother was shot dead, and the family left for America.

Steinbeck took the title Of Mice and Men from a poem by which writer?

Robert Burns's 'To a Mouse' warns that the best-laid schemes of mice and men often go wrong; Steinbeck swapped the line in for his working title, 'Something That Happened'.

Which university did Steinbeck drift in and out of for six years without graduating?

Stanford: he signed up only for the courses that interested him, mostly literature and writing, and kept dropping out to work on ranches before leaving for good.

After winters alone as an estate caretaker, Steinbeck met his first wife Carol at a fish hatchery where?

Lake Tahoe: he finished his first novel while isolated there through long winters, then took a summer job at the Tahoe City hatchery, where Carol walked in as a tourist.

Which highway did Steinbeck christen 'the mother road' as the Joads drove it west in The Grapes of Wrath?

Route 66 carried Dust Bowl families west to California, and Steinbeck's phrase for it in the novel stuck: the highway has been known as the Mother Road ever since.

Which rock star named his 1995 album The Ghost of Tom Joad after the hero of The Grapes of Wrath?

Bruce Springsteen set the title song in the 1990s, likening its homeless and jobless to Steinbeck's Dust Bowl migrants; the hushed acoustic album won a Grammy for best contemporary folk album.

Which marine biologist became Steinbeck's mentor from 1930 and the model for 'Doc' in Cannery Row?

Ed Ricketts ran Pacific Biological Laboratories, selling preserved sea creatures to schools, and his tide-pool habit of seeing life as one connected whole runs through Steinbeck's fiction.

What was Steinbeck's first novel, published in 1929, about the privateer Henry Morgan?

Cup of Gold reached shops in August 1929, two months before the Wall Street crash, and found few readers; his next two books fared no better.

Steinbeck took the title The Moon Is Down from a line in which Shakespeare play?

Macbeth: Banquo's son says 'The moon is down' shortly before Macbeth goes to murder King Duncan, and Steinbeck borrowed the words for his novel of a town under enemy occupation.

Which 1935 novel about wine-loving friends on the California coast gave Steinbeck his first popular success?

Tortilla Flat won the Commonwealth Club of California's gold medal for the best novel by a Californian and, after three books that barely sold, finally brought him readers and money.

Steinbeck wrote the novella Of Mice and Men as an experiment that could double as what?

A stage play: he shaped the book in three acts so it could be performed from its own lines, and it opened on Broadway the same year, winning the Drama Critics' Circle Award for best play.

Which actor played Lennie in the 1939 film of Of Mice and Men?

Lon Chaney Jr. had played Lennie on stage in Los Angeles, and that won him the part in the first Steinbeck book to be filmed; it was his first major screen role.

Who played Lennie opposite Gary Sinise's George in the 1992 film of Of Mice and Men?

John Malkovich and Gary Sinise had first played Lennie and George on stage at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre in 1980; Sinise, who also directed the film, got the rights from Steinbeck's widow.

Whose photographs of migrant families illustrated Their Blood Is Strong, Steinbeck's 1938 pamphlet on California's farm camps?

Dorothea Lange's picture filled the cover; the pamphlet reprinted Steinbeck's newspaper reports from the migrant camps, the research that grew into The Grapes of Wrath.

The Grapes of Wrath, the top-selling novel of 1939, won which award for fiction the following year?

The Pulitzer Prize came in 1940 even as opponents denounced the novel as communist propaganda and some places banned and burned it.

Who played Tom Joad in the 1940 film of The Grapes of Wrath?

Henry Fonda wanted the part so badly that he signed the seven-year contract with Fox that studio boss Darryl Zanuck demanded in return; it brought his first Oscar nomination.

Which California county banned The Grapes of Wrath from its schools and libraries from 1939 to 1941?

Kern County is where the Joads end up; a big growers' group pushed the ban through and staged a photo of a farm worker burning the book, which he had not read.

Which First Lady toured California's migrant camps and backed The Grapes of Wrath as no exaggeration?

Eleanor Roosevelt had already praised the novel in her newspaper column; after seeing the camps herself she told a reporter, 'I have never believed that The Grapes of Wrath was exaggerated.'

Sea of Cortez (1941), Steinbeck's book with his biologist friend, describes a collecting trip to which body of water?

The Gulf of California is the Sea of Cortez by another name; the book reached shops the week of Pearl Harbor and sank, and in 1951 Steinbeck reissued its narrative half alone.

Steinbeck never names the occupied northern country in The Moon Is Down, but which nation gave him a Freedom Cross for it?

Norway took the occupied town for its own: banned copies passed from hand to hand under the Nazis, though being caught with one could mean prison or death.

Which Hollywood star founded the Navy's 'Beach Jumpers', the deception unit Steinbeck sailed with in 1943?

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. had talked the Navy into forming the unit; Steinbeck went along as a reporter and wrote up how a small landing party bluffed the German garrison on Ventotene into surrender.

Steinbeck asked to have his name removed from which 1944 Hitchcock film he had written?

Lifeboat, he complained, mocked organised labour and turned the 'Negro of dignity' in his story into a comic figure; Fox kept his name on it anyway, and the story earned him an Oscar nomination.

Steinbeck's 1945 novel Cannery Row is set among the sardine canneries of which California city?

Monterey renamed Ocean View Avenue as Cannery Row in 1958 in the novel's honour, and one of its defunct sardine canneries became the Monterey Bay Aquarium in 1984.

On his 1940 Sea of Cortez voyage, Steinbeck heard the folk tale behind The Pearl in which Mexican port?

La Paz was once rich in pearls; Steinbeck retold the local tale in his log of the trip and, five years later, reworked it as a magazine story, 'The Pearl of the World'.

Steinbeck's screenplay Viva Zapata!, directed by Elia Kazan, starred which actor as Emiliano Zapata?

Marlon Brando was nominated for Best Actor and Steinbeck for his script, but the film's only Oscar went to Anthony Quinn, who played Zapata's brother.

Which photographer accompanied Steinbeck to the Soviet Union in 1947 for the book A Russian Journal?

Robert Capa's photographs fill A Russian Journal, in which the two men set out to do 'honest reporting' on how ordinary Soviet people lived, 'without editorial comment'.

How did Steinbeck's friend and mentor, the biologist behind 'Doc', die in May 1948?

A train struck his car at a railway crossing; Steinbeck rushed west but arrived hours after his friend died, and later wrote a long tribute essay to him.

Drafting East of Eden, Steinbeck began each working day with a letter to whom?

His editor, Pascal Covici, never got them in the post: Steinbeck wrote each letter on a left-hand page of his notebook, then the day's stretch of the novel on the page facing it.

Which family in East of Eden is based on Steinbeck's own maternal ancestry?

The Hamiltons carry his mother's maiden name: his real grandfather Samuel Hamilton is a main character, and a young John Steinbeck turns up in the story himself.

Who got his first starring role in the 1955 film of East of Eden, directed by Elia Kazan?

James Dean died in a car crash six months after the film opened, so the Best Actor nomination it earned him arrived after his death.

In 1959 Steinbeck rented a cottage in Somerset, England, to research his retelling of which legend?

King Arthur had gripped him since he read Malory's Morte d'Arthur as a boy; he never finished his modern retelling, which was published eight years after his death.

What breed of dog was Charley of Travels with Charley?

A standard poodle born on the outskirts of Paris: Steinbeck wrote that Charley answered quickly only to commands in French, and he used the dog as an 'ambassador' to break the ice with strangers.

What did Steinbeck name the camper truck he drove across America in 1960?

Rocinante was Don Quixote's horse: Steinbeck wrote that he chose the name because his planned trip had drawn 'satiric remarks' from his friends.

What was Steinbeck's last novel, published in 1961?

The Winter of Our Discontent disappointed many American reviewers, yet the Swedish Academy singled it out a year later, saying he had matched the standard of The Grapes of Wrath.

Which American novelist last won the Nobel before Steinbeck?

Ernest Hemingway never collected his in person: still recovering from two plane crashes in Africa, he stayed home in 1954 and the American ambassador read his speech in Stockholm.

Asked on the day of the announcement whether he deserved the Nobel Prize, what did Steinbeck reply?

'Frankly, no,' he said. A Swedish paper called the award one of the Academy's biggest mistakes, and Steinbeck, stung by the attacks, never wrote another novel.

Which Danish author was shortlisted alongside Steinbeck for the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature?

Karen Blixen, author of Out of Africa, ruled herself out by dying that September; files opened 50 years later show the committee saw no obvious candidates and settled on Steinbeck.

Steinbeck called which cartoonist, creator of a satirical comic strip, 'possibly the best writer in the world today'?

Al Capp drew Li'l Abner; the praise comes from Steinbeck's introduction to a 1953 collection of the strip, where he went on to suggest that Capp be given the Nobel Prize.

Which president, a personal friend, presented Steinbeck with the Presidential Medal of Freedom?

Lyndon B. Johnson gave him the medal in 1964; their friendship helps explain why the novelist branded a radical in the 1930s publicly defended Johnson's war in Vietnam.

For which newspaper did Steinbeck report from Vietnam in his 'Letters to Alicia'?

Newsday's co-founder Alicia Patterson, a friend, had died in 1963, yet he wrote his dispatches as letters to her; he flew out in December 1966 and visited his soldier son John.

Which state are the Joads from in The Grapes of Wrath?

Oklahoma is where the novel opens: Tom Joad, just out of prison, walks home to find his family evicted from their farm and getting ready to drive to California.

Steinbeck set his best-known books in California, but in which city did he die in 1968?

New York had been home since 1950, when he moved east for good with his third wife; California's great novelist spent his last eighteen years in Manhattan, with a summer house on Long Island.

To which agency did Steinbeck write in 1952, offering his services during a long tour of Europe?

The CIA's director, Walter Bedell Smith, wrote back welcoming the offer; what Steinbeck then did for the agency, if anything, has never come to light.

According to his son Thom, J. Edgar Hoover had which agency hound Steinbeck?

The Internal Revenue Service audited his father every single year, Thom Steinbeck wrote, because Hoover took the novelist for a communist yet had nothing he could pin on him.

Which playwright did Steinbeck publicly back in 1957 for refusing to name names to HUAC?

Arthur Miller was convicted of contempt of Congress that year; Steinbeck defended him in an Esquire essay, 'The Trial of Arthur Miller', and the conviction was overturned in 1958.

The title The Grapes of Wrath is a reference to which song?

'The Battle Hymn of the Republic' has God 'trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored'; it was Steinbeck's wife Carol who suggested the phrase as his title.

East of Eden's jealous Trask brother is modelled on which biblical figure?

Cain: two generations of Trask brothers, Charles and Adam and then Caleb and Aron, replay Cain and Abel, and the title is where Genesis sends Cain after the murder: 'on the east of Eden'.

Which folk singer retold The Grapes of Wrath in his 1940 ballad 'Tom Joad'?

Woody Guthrie squeezed the whole plot into a ballad so long that it filled both sides of a 78 rpm record on his album Dust Bowl Ballads.

A reporter who retraced Travels with Charley half a century later concluded what about Steinbeck's account?

It was largely fictionalised, he argued: a letter put Steinbeck in a motel some 300 miles from one roadside meeting he describes, and his wife joined him for much of the 'solo' trip.

Which animal gets its own chapter in The Grapes of Wrath?

A turtle: chapter 3 follows it across a highway, where one driver swerves to spare it and a trucker swerves to hit it, yet it rights itself and plods on, an emblem of the migrants' persistence.

In Of Mice and Men, which animals does Lennie dream of tending on the farm he and George hope to buy?

Rabbits: Lennie loves stroking soft things but does not know his own strength, and he keeps asking George to tell him again how he will get to tend them.

Which songwriting duo turned Steinbeck's novel Sweet Thursday into the 1955 Broadway musical Pipe Dream?

Rodgers and Hammerstein had one of their few failures with it, even though Steinbeck had written the novel, a sequel to Cannery Row, hoping it would become a musical.

Who played Doc opposite Debra Winger in the 1982 film of Steinbeck's Cannery Row?

Nick Nolte's first co-star, Raquel Welch, was fired early in the shoot and replaced by Winger; Welch sued the studio and a jury awarded her $10.8 million.

In Travels with Charley, Steinbeck watches women jeer a small Black girl entering a newly integrated school in which city?

New Orleans, late 1960: the jeering mothers, nicknamed the Cheerleaders, gathered daily outside the school that six-year-old Ruby Bridges had just integrated, and the sight left Steinbeck depressed.

Which playwright toured the Soviet Union with Steinbeck in 1963?

Edward Albee joined Steinbeck for a month there on a cultural exchange President Kennedy had asked for, and both spoke out when a visiting Yale professor was arrested as a spy.

Steinbeck's strike novel In Dubious Battle takes its title from a line in which epic poem?

Paradise Lost has Satan recall fighting God 'in dubious battle on the plains of Heaven'; Steinbeck gave the phrase to a fruit pickers' strike in which neither side comes out clean.

Which composer scored the films of both Of Mice and Men (1939) and The Red Pony (1949)?

Aaron Copland was Oscar-nominated for his Of Mice and Men music, and he reworked the Red Pony score into an orchestral suite for the Houston Symphony.

Which director won an Oscar for the 1940 film of The Grapes of Wrath?

John Ford took Best Director for it, though the film itself lost Best Picture to Hitchcock's Rebecca; Jane Darwell also won an Oscar as Ma Joad.