Steinbeck became a celebrity with the publication of Of Mice and Men in 1937. The novel was well received both critically and popularly. Chosen as a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection, Of Mice and Men soon became a national bestseller. Steinbeck returned to New York in triumph and toured Europe. He eventually settled in the fashionable East Coast writers’ colony of Buck’s County, where he worked on the script of the play version of the novel with the famous playwright, George Kaufman. The play opened in late November 1937 to rave reviews, received the New York Drama Critic Circle’s Award for Best Play, and enjoyed a long, successful run before being made into a theatrical film. Even Steinbeck’s good fortune, however, could not save his publishing house from ruin. Pascal Covici would leave the financially defunct firm of Covici, Friede to become the executive editor of Viking Press, and Steinbeck would follow. In 1938, Viking published The Long Valley, a collection of Steinbeck’s short stories.
Although enjoying huge success both financially and critically, Steinbeck remained a man of the people. He refused an offer from Life magazine to write about the migrant workers because he felt it would be wrong to make money off their misfortune. He continued to base his writing on actual experiences, living and working among the very folks he would use as material for his work. In fact, on the night that Of Mice and Men opened on Broadway, he was in a squatters camp with a group of migrants with whom he had traveled from Oklahoma.
The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939 and immediately caused a literary furor, well documented by Warren French. The top selling novel of 1939, it won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Booksellers Award, merits which supported Steinbeck’s election to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters. A movie version of the novel was soon filmed and also received critical accolades. Although there are not specific financial records documenting the sale of the book, the numerous American printings and foreign translations would attest to a generous increase in Steinbeck’s income. This likelihood is supported by the fact that his first wife, suing for divorce in 1942, received a $220,000 settlement.
In the years immediately following The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck, now somewhat of a literary celebrity, traveled and toiled primarily on war-related works. He and his best friend, Ed Ricketts, returned to Mexico twice. The first trip, in March 1940, is chronicled in The Sea of Cortez; the men returned the next month to film the semi-documentary film, The Forgotten Village. The work would occupy him for the remainder of the year. In 1942, he wrote an Army Air Force-commissioned book entitled Bombs Away, and donated the earnings of his play-novelette, The Moon Is Down, to the war effort.
Perhaps as an antidote to the suffering he had seen in the war, Steinbeck published Cannery Row in 1945, a light-hearted romanticizing of the pre-war antics of the vagabonds and idlers of Monterey’s Cannery Row. He followed in 1947 with what many consider his finest short story, “The Pearl,” and the novel The Wayward Bus. The year 1948 marked several important events in Steinbeck’s life. He was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and divorced from his second wife, Gwyn Verdon. Perhaps the most traumatic event of the year was the loss of his closest friend, Ed Ricketts, in an automobile accident. In 1950, Steinbeck married Elaine Scott. His third marriage seemed to invigorate him, and he began work on a new novel, an ambitious epic of good and evil set in his own Salinas Valley. East of Eden was published in 1952 to lukewarm critical reception. Steinbeck’s output during the 1950s slowed, consisting mainly of magazine pieces and an unsuccessful rehashing of Cannery Row entitled Sweet Thursday. In 1961, Steinbeck re-emerged with The Winter of Our Discontent, and in 1962, he was awarded the world’s highest literary recognition, a Nobel Prize for literature. Not content to settle down comfortably, Steinbeck took to the road in late 1961, armed with a stack of maps and an elderly poodle named Charlie. His adventures across the country were recounted in one of his last works, Travels with Charlie. John Steinbeck died on December 20, 1968.
