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Find definitions for over 300,000 words from the most authoritative English dictionary. Continuously updated with new words and meanings.

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https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/the%20American%20dream

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National: Defining the American Dream | The New York Times

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Ask History: What Happened to the Aztecs? | History

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In March 1940 he and his close friend, marine biologist Ed Ricketts, sailed to the Gulf of California to collect marine specimens.  Here he gains his inspiration for The Pearl.
Throughout the 1930s, Ricketts, who collected marine specimens for a living and sold them through his laboratory, Pacific Biological, was a major influence on Steinbeck’s writing and thinking.

In 1947, Steinbeck published The Pearl , an elaboration on a story he had heard in La Paz during his trip with Ed Ricketts to the Gulf of California. He also combines the concepts from the Fall of Man story, the Biblical parable the Pearl of Great Price and the Middle Age poem The Perle

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Steinbeck Biography - Pacific Grove, CA, USA

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Steinbeck Biography - Pacific Grove, CA, USA

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What did he write about? Growing up in working class towns, he became an excellent observer of human nature and later wrote about the people he lived around- workers, including Mexican-American and migrant workers.  He discovered the harsh reality that these people were often treated poorly and without respect and had little means of defending themselves.  As a result, many of the characters that he wrote about were down and out, isolated and oppressed.  They represent the "struggle" theme of his novels--principally the struggle between the poor and the wealthy, the weak and the strong, good and evil, and between cultures and civilizations.  These themes are all evident in The Pearl.

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John Steinbeck - Nobel Prize Author | Mini Bio | BIO

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The fertile and temperate valley of Salinas California. 

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In 1902, Salinas, California was a prosperous farming community, founded about fifty years earlier. Agriculture was the region’s pay dirt. Only fifteen miles from the Pacific, the 50-mile long Salinas Valley was cool and often foggy, temperatures moderate, and the soil rich beyond measure. Ranchers and farmers thrived. Growing wheat and barley in the 19th century, sugar beets in the late 1890s and vegetables and lettuce in the opening decades of the 20th century, growers and shippers’ fortunes would soar during John Steinbeck’s childhood and teens. By the time he went to college in 1919, the valley was about to ship lettuce across America in refrigerated railroad cars. Lettuce became the “green gold” of the Salinas Valley.

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Green Gold - A Salinas Valley Mother Lode - Soul of CA

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The success of California's billion dollar agricultural industry wash helped along by enterprising farmers who settled in the Salinas Valley. They truly changed the landscape of this valley, redefining what it meant to strike gold. There is not doubt that California's gold rush transformed California.

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The Steinbeck House Restaurant, Central Avenue, Salinas, CA, USA

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The Steinbeck House Restaurant, Central Avenue, Salinas, CA, USA

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The Steinbeck House Restaurant, Central Avenue, Salinas, CA, USA

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John Steinbeck was born in Salinas in 1902, in a stately home on Central Ave (now open as a popular luncheon spot). During his childhood, Salinas had a population of about 5000, was the county seat of Monterey County, and a trading and shipping center for the lower Salinas Valley. The geography and demographics of the valley, the “Salad Bowl of the Nation,” stamped the young boy’s sensibilities. A strong sense of place is evident in his fiction: “I think I would like to write the story of this whole valley,” he wrote to a friend in 1933, when he was 31 years old, “of all the little towns and all the farms and the ranches in the wilder hills. I can see how I would like to do it so that it would be the valley of the world.” In 1952 he published his epic novel about the Salinas Valley, East of Eden.

In fact, Steinbeck would grow up to tell stories that many area Salinas Valley ranchers and farmers would rather not be told—embedded in his novels was Salinas gossip; his characters were often lonely, misunderstood farmers and ranchers; and in his books, dreams of ordinary workers are dashed—his books tell of failed dreams of land ownership in California. The Grapes of Wrath, his signature novel, published in 1939, traces the journey of the Joad family from Oklahoma to California, where they find not the fabled land of their dreams but a place with few jobs, low wages, and inadequate worker housing. Steinbeck’s novel excoriated the greed of the Associated Farmers, business interests in California. That position did not make him a popular figure in his hometown of Salinas.

When Steinbeck was born, his father, John Ernst Steinbeck, was a manager at Sperry Flour mill in Salinas. His mother had been a school teacher, and she was sturdily committed to literature and intellectual pursuits.

Steinbeck’s childhood was placid enough—although early on he saw himself as an outsider and a rebel. He was a restless and curious child.When he was 11, his father lost his job at Sperry Flour when the plant closed, and Steinbeck felt the deep shame of his father’s loss and subsequent failures as a businessman– a feed and grain store Mr. Steinbeck purchased failed to prosper. Only when young Steinbeck was in college did the family fortunes stabilize and Mr. Steinbeck became Monterey county treasurer.

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Stockholm City Hall, Hantverkargatan, Stockholm, Sweden

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Stockholm City Hall, Hantverkargatan, Stockholm, Sweden

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Stockholm City Hall, Hantverkargatan, Stockholm, Sweden

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The Nobel Prize in Literature 1962 was awarded to John Steinbeck "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception."

Below is an excerpt from his speech.

"Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion. My great predecessor, William Faulkner, speaking here, referred to it as a tragedy of universal fear so long sustained that there were no longer problems of the spirit, so that only the human heart in conflict with itself seemed worth writing about.

Faulkner, more than most men, was aware of human strength as well as of human weakness. He knew that the understanding and the resolution of fear are a large part of the writer’s reason for being.

This is not new. The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.

Furthermore, the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit – for gallantry in defeat – for courage, compassion and love.

In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally-flags of hope and of emulation.

I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man, has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

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The Nobel Prize in Literature 1962 was awarded to John Steinbeck “for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception”