1. John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California in 1902

2. Salinas, California is a rural area.

3. Steinbeck’s family owned a ranch and he spent a great deal of time as a young man with farm workers.

4. Steinbeck worked on farms while he attended Stanford University on and off over seven years. He never graduated from college and only took those classes he decided he would help his career as a writer. He moved to New York to work as a journalist in 1925.

5. He was fired as a reporter for including his own opinions and getting too close to the people he wrote about. Steinbeck was concerned about the lives of ordinary working people and his first novel Tortilla Flats concerned the lives of paisanos working on the California farms he was so familiar with.

6. Tortilla Flats

7. Steinbeck was very concerned about the conditions of workers during the depression of the 1930’s.

8. During the depression many people were displaced by farm foreclosures
During the depression many people were displaced by farm foreclosures. These workers often moved to California for work.

9. The depression caused many men to leave home to search for work elsewhere. They were sometimes called bindle stiffs.

10. These are the people Steinbeck writes about in his novels Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath

11. Steinbeck wanted to portray the lives of itinerant workers particularly in the west. He wrote about their lives and the treatment they received at the hands of their employers. He was accused of being a communist and shunned by the people of his town for his work.

12. John Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962.

13. If you had to pack up and leave home to find work, What would you take with you? What would you miss the most? Write on every second line. Begin with a thesis statement and give reasons and details.