Analyzing the Theme of Of Mice and Men

Keith Everitt

English III
March 11, 2015
Biography
John Steinbeck John Steinbeck is one of the most well-known authors of the modern era. He has many works that are at least basically known of by almost all Americans. He is one America’s most iconic writers from the 20th century. John Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902 in Salinas, California. He was the son of a county treasurer and a schoolteacher. At the beginning of his life, the only kind of work that he knew was working with ranches in the Salinas Valley and the Monterey coast. When he was through with high school he went on to study at Stanford University. He was not much of a college guy though. After he was through with that he had many different little jobs. Until, finally he published his first novel in 1935 called Tortilla Flat. After Tortilla Flat, he began to build a successful career out of his writing. He published a best-selling novel in 1937, Of Mice and Men, a story about poor ranch hands in California. He had great sympathy for the “Okies”, migrant farmers from Oklahoma, which led to him writing The Grapes of Wrath. The Grapes of Wrath became a best seller and it won him a Pulitzer Prize. This novel is ultimately what launched him to the level of fame he had. Not all of his works take place in California though. Some of his other famous works are The Moon Is Down, taking place in a Nazi controlled Scandinavian village, The Pearl, dealing with the tragedy facing a Mexican family, East of Eden, considered to be his finest novel, and many others. Steinbeck has been cited as an author with “great feeling for nature, for the tilled soil, the wasteland, the mountains and the ocean coasts…in the midst of, and beyond, the world of human beings.” Also he’s noted for “a strain of grim humor which to some extent redeems his