john steinbacks timeline

                 Feb 27, 1902

John Ernst Steinbeck III is born in Salinas, California. He is the third of four children (and the only boy) born to John Steinbeck, Sr., the treasurer of Monterey County, and his wife Olive Hamilton Steinbeck, a schoolteacher. As an older boy, Steinbeck will work summers on the nearby Spreckels Farm.

1919

John Steinbeck graduates from Salinas High School and enrolls at Stanford University. When not at school, he works odd jobs at ranches, shops, farms and factories.

1925

After six years as an on-again, off-again student, Steinbeck leaves Stanford for the last time. In November he travels to New York City to start his life as a writer. He never receives his degree.

1926

Steinbeck returns to California and settles in Lake Tahoe. He works as a handyman at a local resort.

Aug 1929

Cup of Gold, Steinbeck's first novel, is published. The book focuses on seventeenth-century pirate Henry Morgan's adventures in Panama. Two months later, in October 1929, the U.S. stock market crashes, sparking the Great Depression.

Jan 14, 1930

Steinbeck marries his first wife, Carol Henning. They move into a small cottage in Pacific Grove, California owned by Steinbeck's father. Steinbeck will complete much of his life's work in this cottage.

Apr 14, 1935

Prolonged drought in the first part of the 1930s has wreaked ecological havoc on the American Midwest. Crops have died, and with nothing to hold down the soil the region has become plagued by catastrophic dust storms. Steinbeck is moved by the plight of the thousands of farmers moving west to seek work and escape devastation at home. On 14 April, also known as Black Sunday, a dust storm of monumental proportions strikes the Midwest. The next day reporters coin the phrase "the Dust Bowl."

May 28, 1935

Tortilla Flat, a novel about a group of young drifters in post-World War I Monterey County, is published. The book garners Steinbeck's first real critical and commercial success, earning him his first California Commonwealth Club medal for best novel by a Californian.