John SteinbeckJohn Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California, shortly after the end of the Civil War. His mother was a teacher in the Salinas public school system. Steinbeck grew up in fertile California where he found the material for most of his novels and short stories. Steinbeck displayed a great imagination, which was ignited by writing from an early age, in part thanks to his schoolteacher mother, who read to him many great literary works at an early age. During his teenage years, Steinbeck played various sports. In high school, I worked many dead-end part-time jobs and wandered the fertile valley. The lessons and observations he made during his wanderings provided much of the material for his later works. Steinbeck entered Stanford University in 1920, and although he attended the school until 1925, he never graduated. Unwilling to acquire a formal degree from Stanford University, Steinbeck headed to New York to pursue a career as a writer. While working on his writing and receiving an endless supply of rejection slips, Steinbeck worked odd jobs. It was at the American newspaper in New York that Steinbeck held a job, writing various articles, for a time before the paper went bankrupt. The failure of the paper and the abundance of rejection letters forced Steinbeck to return to California, broken but still hopeful. Steinbeck's first novel, Cup of Gold, was published in 1929, two months before the horrific stock market crash, which brought the novel almost unnoticed with barely fifteen hundred copies sold. 1930 was a very important year for Steinbeck in two areas. He married first Carol Henning and the newlyweds settled in Pacific Grove, from which he wrote often. There, Steinbeck met Ed Ricketts whose friendship strongly influenced Steinbeck's works. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Steinbeck knew many people considered representative of society and shared with them many of the problems of the time. His father, like many men, helped his family through the depression with a small house and twenty-five dollars a week. Throughout the Depression era, Steinbeck wrote about people struggling to make ends meet in the California, Mexico area. One of Steinbeck's works, Tortilla Flat, marked a turning point in Steinbeck's literary career..