Clil LITERATURE JOHN STEINBECK, THE VOICE OF FARMERS MIGRATION John Steinbeck (1902-1968) was born in Salinas, California, in a middle-class family. He attended Stanford University but left without graduating. In 1925, he went to New York, hoping to start a career as a journalist, but he failed and returned to California in 1927. After publishing some novels and short stories, Steinbeck first became widely known with Tortilla Flat (1935). Steinbeck s novels can all be classified as social novels dealing with the economic problems of rural workers. After the humor of Tortilla Flat, he moved on to more serious fiction with the novel In Dubious Battle (1936), which deals with the strikes of the migratory fruit pickers on California plantations. This was followed by Of Mice and Men (1937), one of his best works, and a series of short stories collected in the volume The Long Valley (1938). In 1939, he published what is considered his masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath. His later works are East of Eden (1952), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), and Travels with Charley (1962). He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. John Steinbeck died in New York City in 1968. The Grapes of Wrath is set in the Great Depression and describes the migration of a family of small farmers, the Joads, from their land in the Midwest because of the Dust Bowl* to the promised land of California. The novel was very popular with readers and won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1940 and was adapted as a film directed by John Ford in the same year. Sacramento Theatre Company *The term Dust Bowl was coined in 1935 when terrible dust storms affected the south-central United States, in particular Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. The Dust Bowl has come to symbolize the social and economic problems of the entire nation during the 1930s. The Grapes of Wrath, John Ford, USA, 1940 fruit picker: raccoglitore di frutta grapes: grappoli strike: sciopero wrath: ira, furore 13 Answer the following questions. 1. Where was John Steinbeck born? 2. How did he spend his early life? 3. What novels did he write? 4. What major international prize did he win? 5. How can Steinbeck s novels be classified? 6. What does the novel The Grapes of Wrath deal with? ONLINE RESOURCES 7. What prizes did the novel win? Historic Route 66 Route 66 (song) 8. How was the novel adapted? PUBLIC WORKS 207