The Moon Is Down

John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California, in 1902 into a family of meager possessions. He even attended Stanford University, without completing any degree. In 1925 he went to New York, where he tried a career as a writer, soon returning to California without success. He achieved his first success in 1935, with The Miracle of St. Francis (Tortilla Flat, in the original edition), confirmed later, in 1937, with the novel Ratos e Homens. His fiction is marked by an immense concern with the problems of rural workers and also by a great fascination with the land. In 1939, he would publish what is considered by many to be his masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath. Among his books, the novels East of Paradise (1952) and The Winter of Our Discontent (1961) stand out, as well as Travels with Charley (1962), in which he recounts a three-month trip through forty American states. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. He died in New York on December 20, 1968.