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Summary of Edward Hopper

No one captured the isolation of the individual within the modern city like Edward Hopper. His imagery of figures within urban settings go well beyond their role as modern cityscapes, exposing the underbelly of the human experience. So while his oeuvre officially falls within the rubric of Realism, it offers a far more evocative look at life between the World Wars. Indeed, by providing a minimum of action, stripping away almost any sign of life or mobility, and adding dramatic means of representation with striking lighting schemes in claustrophobic spaces, Hopper suggests something of the psychological inner life of his subjects, leading the way towards Abstract Expressionism. He injected significance, and the weight of the individual's existential being in the modern metropolis or in country life, into what otherwise might appear to be straight-forward images of everyday life.

Accomplishments

Hopper's imagery is consistently restrained, presenting part of a story or one suggestive aspect. By leaving many clues but no specific answers, he forces the viewer to complete the narrative. This element of his art would have major repercussions for the development of postmodernism wherein the viewer has a major role in the understanding of the artwork.

Hopper's individuals, usually depicted isolated and disconnected from their environments either literally by glass windows or metaphorically through formal means, are manifestations of the artist's focus on the solitude of modern life. The starkness of detail and unmodulated revelatory light in many works builds a tension, drawing the viewer's attention away from the given subject, and suggesting much about his emotional experience. In this way, the artist's work acts as a bridge between the interest in everyday life exhibited by the contemporary Ashcan School and the exploration of mood by later existential artists.

Many of the houses depicted by Hopper, animated through artistic means, set apart from their environs, lit with a blanching light which dramatically highlights and casts into shadow, viewed from evocative angles, have provided inspiration to the film making industry.

Important Art by Edward Hopper

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN

Biography of Edward Hopper

Childhood

Edward Hopper was born into a comfortable, middle-class family in Nyack, New York, in 1882. His parents introduced Edward, and his older sister Marion, to the arts early in life; they attended the theatre, concerts and other cultural events, and visited museums. His father owned a dry goods store where Hopper sometimes worked as a teen. Hopper described him as "an incipient intellectual... less at home with his books of accounts than with Montaigne's essays." Both his parents were supportive of his artistic inclinations.

As a boy, Hopper was quiet and reserved. He was over six feet tall by his early teens, had few friends, and spent much of his time alone with his books and art. His home in Nyack stood on a hill overlooking the Hudson River, just north of New York City. At the time Nyack was a vibrant hub of transit and industry. There was an active train station, three shipbuilding companies, a port for steamboats, and the cross-Hudson ferry. Young Edward spent his days by the river, sketchpad in hand, observing and drawing the rigging and building of boats. This early period is documented in numerous drawings of boats and ships as well as several handmade wooden model boats. As a teen he built a full-sized catboat and briefly considered pursuing a career in naval architecture. The seriousness with which the artist approached his artistic ambitions had already revealed itself by age 10 when he began to sign and date his drawings.

Early Period

After graduating high school in 1899, Hopper's parents encouraged him to study commercial illustration instead of fine art. Accordingly, he spent a year at the New York School of Illustration in Manhattan before transferring to the more serious New York School of Art to realize his dream. His teachers there included the American Impressionist William Merritt Chase (who founded the school) and Robert Henri, a leading figure of the Ashcan school, whose proponents advocated depicting the grittier side of urban life. Hopper's classmates at the school included George Bellows, Guy Pene du Bois, and Rockwell Kent.

In 1905, Hopper began working as an illustrator for a New York City advertising agency but never really liked illustrating and longed for the freedom to paint from his imagination. Unfortunately, success was slow in coming and he was forced to earn his living as an illustrator for nearly 20 more years until his painting career took off.

Hopper travelled to Europe three times between 1906 and 1910, enjoying two extended stays in Paris. The influence of the Impressionists led him to the streets to draw and paint en plein air, or, as Hopper described it, "from the fact." Years later he would call his work from this period, a form of "modified impressionism." He was especially attracted to Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas's unusual compositional arrangements in their depictions of modern urban life. During a visit to Amsterdam, Hopper also admired Rembrandt's Nightwatch, which called "the most wonderful thing of his I have seen, it's past belief in its reality - it almost amounts to deception."

After returning from his final trip abroad in 1910, Hopper moved permanently to New York City and, in 1913, settled at 3 Washington Square North. This would be his home and studio for the rest of his life. That same year he sold his first painting, Sailing (1911), for $250 at the Armory show in New York. Though he never stopped painting, it would be 11 years before he sold another painting. During that time he continued to earn his living illustrating and, in 1915, he took up printmaking, producing some 70 etchings and dry points over the next decade. Like the paintings for which he would later become renowned, Hopper's etchings embody a sense alienation and melancholy. One of his better known etchings, Night Shadows (1921) features the birds'-eye viewpoint, the dramatic use of light and shadow, and the air of mystery which would serve as inspiration for many film noir movies of the 1940s. Hopper continued to receive great acclaim for his etchings over the years and considered them an essential part of his artistic development. As he wrote, "After I took up etching, my painting seemed to crystallize."

Mature Period

In 1923, Hopper visited Gloucester, Massachusetts. There he became reacquainted with Josephine (Jo) Nivison, whom he had met years earlier as an art student of Robert Henri. He worked in watercolor that summer and it was Jo who encouraged him later that year to join her in participating in a show at the Brooklyn Museum. He exhibited six watercolors there, including The Mansard Roof (1923), which the museum purchased for $100.

In 1924, Hopper married Jo. From that time on she became his primary model and most ardent supporter. In that same year he had a solo exhibition of watercolors at the Frank K. M. Rehn Gallery in New York. The show sold out and the Rehn Gallery continued to represent him for the rest of his life. This success enabled Hopper to finally give up illustrating.

Over the next several years, Hopper's painting style matured and his signature iconography emerged--from isolated figures in public or private interiors, to sun-soaked architecture, silent streets, and coastal scenes with lighthouses. In 1930, House by the Railroad (1925) became the first painting accessioned to the permanent collection of the newly founded Museum of Modern Art. The early 1930s were, indeed, a period of great success for Hopper, with sales to major museums and in 1933, a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.

Despite his commercial success, Hopper and Jo lived a frugal lifestyle, only allowing themselves the indulgence of attending theatre and films. Hopper particularly loved going to movies. His first documented visit to one was in Paris in 1909. As he explained, "When I don't feel in the mood for painting, I go to the movies for a week or more. I go on a regular movie binge."

Early in their marriage the Hoppers spent summers painting in New England, mostly Gloucester and coastal Maine. They also travelled across the country and to Mexico, where they painted watercolors side by side. From 1934, they began spending summers at the house and studio Hopper designed for them in South Truro, Cape Cod in Massachusetts.

Late Period

Hopper continued to be productive during the war years and remained unperturbed by the potential threats following the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was precisely during this period that he worked on his most well known painting, Nighthawks (1942). Through the 1950s and early 1960s, Hopper continued to see acclaim and success, despite the arrival of Abstract Expressionism, Pop, and Minimalism to the New York art scene. The universal appeal of his subjects continued to find an avid audience.

Hopper was not a prolific painter. He often found it hard to settle on a subject to paint and then spent a great deal of time working out the details of the composition through numerous studies. By the end of his life he averaged just two oils a year. Hopper died on May 15, 1967 and Jo Hopper died just 10 months later, bequeathing their artistic estate to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Hopper is buried, along with Jo, his sister and his parents, in Nyack's Oak Hill Cemetery.

The Legacy of Edward Hopper

Hopper has inspired countless painters, photographers, filmmakers, set designers, dancers, writers, and musicians and the term "Hopperesque" is now widely used to connote images reminiscent of Hopper's moods and subjects. In the visual arts, Hopper's influence has touched artists in a range of media including Mark Rothko, George Segal, Banksy, Ed Ruscha, and Tony Oursler. The painter Eric Fischl remarked, "You can tell how great an artist is by how long it takes you to get through his territory...I'm still in the territory that he opened up." Richard Diebenkorn recalled the importance of Hopper's influence on his work when he was a student stating, "I embraced Hopper completely ... It was his use of light and shade and the atmosphere ... kind of drenched, saturated with mood, and its kind of austerity ... It was the kind of work that just seemed made for me. I looked at it and it was mine." In the exhibition and catalogue, Edward Hopper & Company: Hopper's Influence on Photography (2009), Jeffrey Fraenkel examines how Edward Hopper inspired a whole school of photographers including Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Harry Callahan, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, and Stephen Shore. Fraenkel writes, "More than almost any American artist, Hopper has had a pervasive impact on the way we see the world--so pervasive as to be almost invisible."

Hopper has had no less of an impact on cinema. Generations of filmmakers have drawn inspiration from Hopper's dramatic viewpoints, lighting, and overall moods, among them, Sam Mendes, David Lynch, Robert Siodmak, Orson Welles, Wim Wenders, and Billy Wilder. His painting, House by the Railroad (1925) inspired Alfred Hitchcock's house in Psycho (1960) as well as that in Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978).

Hopper's open-ended narratives have also appealed to writers and musicians. Tom Waits titled an album Nighthawks at the Diner and Madonna named a concert tour after the painting Girlie Show (1941). Joyce Carol Oates refers directly to Hopper in her poem, Edward Hopper's Nighthawks 1942. Many others have created whole collections of stories or poems using Hopper paintings as starting points. Hopper's Nighthawks has been appropriated and used hundreds of times in all forms of media within popular culture. An image of the painting or a facsimile of it can be found in an episode of the Simpsons, as the backdrop for a Peeps marshmallows ad, or featuring Marilyn Monroe and James Dean (in Gottfried Helnwein's Boulevard of Broken Dreams (1984)), morphed into a Starbucks, a space station, and in a variety of cartoons in The New Yorker.

The artist and writer Victor Burgin properly summed up Hopper's pervasive impact when he said, "We need not look for Hopper in order to find him. We may encounter him by chance at random places where his world intersects our own. We might ask whether or not this photograph by the American documentary photographer Larry Sultan was taken with Edward Hopper's paintings consciously in mind. But the question is irrelevant. To know Hopper's work is to be predisposed to see the world in his terms, consciously or not."

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Edward Hopper

Similar Art

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Hopper's figures within urban settings expose the underbelly of the modern human experience and his work is a powerful blend of nostalgia and decadence.

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Summary of Grant Wood

Hailed as one of America's foremost Regionalist painters in the 1930s, Grant Wood strove to depict archetypal rural subjects that embodied the values of hard work, community, and austerity. Eschewing the idioms of avant-garde European art, Wood depicted his native Midwest with the clarity and precision he observed in Northern Renaissance art and the organic lines and curves of Art Deco design, melding these disparate styles into a uniquely American vision. In painting small town and rural life, Wood gave the American public an idealized vision of itself at a time during the Great Depression when most common, working Americans faced great hardship.

In subsequent decades, his work has been praised and derided by critics and public alike, but his paintings, and in particular American Gothic, remain some of the most iconic, and appropriated, paintings created by an American artist, thus providing Wood with a permanent place in American popular culture.

Accomplishments

Despite his relatively short mature career and his dismissal by important critics and scholars in the 1940s, Grant Wood endures as one of America's most popular artists, who painted quintessentially American scenes. His adherence to realism coupled with highly complex formal compositions and slightly strange perspectives draws viewers into a world that is not always what one expects. While many are happy to find depictions of a bucolic America, many also revel in the strangeness and subtle criticality that Wood presents.

After the stock market crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression, American artists turned their efforts to creating a particular strain of American art that embodied patriotic values that hearkened back to an earlier time. Nostalgic and romantic, Regionalism pictured an American society devoted to productive labor and tightknit communities. Along with John Steuart Curry and Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood depicted stalwart Midwestern types that embodied this idealized America.

While most famously known for his paintings, which garnered immediate national attention, Wood also worked in decorative arts, jewelry design, and illustration. He did so in part to make much-needed money for his family, but he was also committed to creating a vibrant artistic culture in small-town Iowa that was not beholden to larger metropolises such as Chicago and New York.

Wood's reputation has never been steady. He endeared himself to Midwesterners, who saw themselves portrayed in a positive light, but Easterners tended to dismiss him because of his purported sentimental, old-fashioned style. More recent interpretations have detected a subtle critical edge to many of his paintings, suggesting that Wood was not necessarily the booster he was made out to be.

While there were rumors about Wood's homosexuality during his lifetime and after his death, Wood never publicly acknowledged this aspect of his identity, and in fact seemed to live in fear of being exposed. More contemporary scholarship has begun to reexamine Wood's painting in light of his sexuality, excavating, in curator David Ward's words, the "tension and difficulties faced by gay men who stayed behind in Middle America."

Biography of Grant Wood

Grant Wood, born in 1891, was the second of Francis Mayville Wood and Hattie Weaver Wood's four children. He spent his early years on a farm in rural Anamosa, Iowa. When he was 10 years old, his father died unexpectedly, and Hattie moved with the four children to Cedar Rapids. Grant and his older brother immediately needed to take odd jobs to help support the family. His childhood on the farm remained an inspiration to him through his artistic career. This timing separated his perspective from other realists: Wood focused on the rosy, mythical memories of boyhood, and a life of simple pleasures in tune with the seasons, rather than the more adult drudgery and economic precariousness that often go hand-in-hand with farming.

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Hailed as one of America's foremost Regionalist painters in the 1930s, Grant Wood strove to depict archetypal rural subjects that embodied the values of hard work, community, and austerity. Eschewing the idioms of avant-garde European art, Wood depicted his native Midwest with the clarity and precision he observed in Northern Renaissance art and the organic lines and curves of Art Deco design, melding these disparate styles into a uniquely American vision.

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Trailer of the film by Gary Sinise in 1992

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Trailer of the film by Gary Sinise in 1992

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Of Mice and Men Official Trailer #1 - John Malkovich Movie (1992) HD

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 Main site : READ about:The Great Depression, The Dust Bowl, The New Deal

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 Main site : READ about:The Great Depression, The Dust Bowl, The New Deal

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Home | Learn | The Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and New Deal in Oklahoma

The Great Depression is one of the single most-important events to occur in world history during the twentieth century. It is also a defining moment in American government, politics, culture, economics, and even Oklahoma history. The Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and the New Deal all brought on big changes in the United States; changes that we can still see today. What is a depression, though? What made this depression "Great?" And, how did people react to the problems that caused and were caused by the Great Depression?

Depression Breadline, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Memorial, Washington, DC (image courtesy of the Library of Congress).

What was the Great Depression?

The Great Depression was the worst depression in modern history, lasting from 1929 to 1941. It affected countries around the world, not just the United States. In the United States, one out of four people lost their job and about 1,000 people lost their homes every day during the worst year of the depression. Many people built makeshift homes in towns called " Hoovervilles," named after President Herbert Hoover who was the president at the start of the Great Depression. Americans were scared and hungry and wanted to know how it happened and who could fix the problem.

Depression versus Recession

Economies around the world go through ups and downs over time. The ups are called growth periods. The downs are called either a " recession" or a " depression." Even economists have a hard time telling the difference between recessions and depressions, but both of them are hard times when people lose money, jobs, homes or farms, and businesses. Many people can even go hungry. Depressions tend to be longer than recessions.

Families waiting in line for bread and soup (image courtesy of the Library of Congress).

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The Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and New Deal in Oklahoma

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Home | Learn | The Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and New Deal in Oklahoma The Great Depression is one of the single most-important events to occur in world history during the twentieth century. It is also a defining moment in American government, politics, culture, economics, and even Oklahoma history.

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Video from PBS about The New Deal and the Dust Bowl

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Video from PBS about The New Deal and the Dust Bowl

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Help came to the Great Plains by way of New Deal programs.

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John Steinbeck - Nobel Prize Author | Mini Bio | BIO

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Dorothea Lange: photographing the Great Depression

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Dorothea Lange: photographing the Great Depression

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Mardi-expo

Cela faisait vingt ans qu'une exposition n'avait pas été consacrée à l'auteure de l'iconique Migrant Mother.

Le Musée du Jeu de Paume (Paris) rend hommage à Dorothea Lange, la photographe emblématique de la Grande Dépression aux Etats-Unis, avec un focus inédit ; son travail sur les Américains d'origine japonaise internés après l'attaque de Pearl Harbor. Eclairage avec Pia Viewing :, commissaire de l'exposition

Dorothea Lange commence sa pratique en 1918 - elle est née en 1895 - de par elle-même, sans commande, juste comme témoin de son époque. Elle descend dans les rues de San Francisco et entreprend de saisir les visages des gens de pauvres moyens. On est en 1932, juste après le crash boursier, elle va photographier dans plus de vingt-deux états de l'Amérique, et va faire ce travail pendant plus de cinq ans.

Le but de cette exposition est de montrer, non pas une rétrospective de la photographe mais de chercher à identifier le rapport entre le travail photographique de Dorothea Lange et l'époque pour essayer de décortiquer l'histoire des Etats-Unis des années 40 et se défaire des idées reçues. Dorothea Lange est une libérale, impliquée politiquement, socialement.

Elle a un grand respect pour les gens qu'elle photographie. Elle les photographie de très près, elle dit qu'elle n'est jamais assez près, montre des visages, des bouts de corps, des mains...

Un homme vu de dos avec un baluchon, on est en 1935. On devine une longue route qui trace sur l'horizon, une photographie qui montre le chemin, le départ, et laisse envisager que la route est longue. On voit que les personnes ne sont pas démunies. On est dans la première vague de migrations. Par la suite, en 1936, 1937, 1939, on verra d'autres cas de migrants qui eux, ont tout perdu - avec les inondations, la sécheresse, la destruction de leurs fermes - et partent, sans rien.

Ce qui était original dans son travail, c'est qu'elle était la seule à couvrir toutes les étapes du déplacement des Américains d'origine japonaise contraints de partir pour les camps d'internement, dès 1942, à la suite de l'attaque de l'armée japonaise, le 7 décembre 1941, de la base navale américaine de Pearl Harbor. C'était une commande ; on ne voit ni les barbelés, ni les policiers, ni les conditions qui accompagnent ces gens. Elle conserve la même empathie qu'elle avait pour les migrants dans les années 30.

Portrait filmé de l'exposition au Musée du Jeu de Paume :

Programmation musicale :

Bob Dylan, Song to Woody, 1962

Lien. Site du [Musée du Jeu de Paume []( http://www.jeudepaume.org/?page=article&idArt=3017)qui, suite aux événements du week-end, ré-ouvre ses portes mardi 4 décembre à 11 heures ]

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Dorothea Lange, la photo comme précieux outil de lutte politique

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Cela faisait vingt ans qu'une exposition n'avait pas été consacrée à l'auteure de l'iconique Migrant Mother. Le Musée du Jeu de Paume (Paris) rend hommage à Dorothea Lange, la photographe emblématique de la Grande Dépression aux Etats-Unis, avec un focus inédit ; son travail sur les Américains d'origine japonaise internés après l'attaque de Pearl Harbor.

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John Steinbeck's biography - National Steinbeck Center website

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John Steinbeck's biography - National Steinbeck Center website

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John Steinbeck Bio

John Steinbeck was born in Salinas in 1902 to a middle-class family living a few blocks from Salinas' bustling Main Street. His father, John Ernst Sr., worked as a manager in the local flour mill. Later, he owned a feed store and was later appointed Monterey County Treasurer. Steinbeck's mother, born Olive Hamilton, was a former school teacher who enforced high academic standards for her children and encouraged a love of literature. John Steinbeck had three sisters: two older sisters Esther and Beth, and a younger sister Mary, whom Steinbeck was close to throughout their childhood together.

Schooling for Steinbeck showed an early love of storytelling and writing. In high school, a favorite teacher of Steinbeck, read his stories aloud to the class as positive examples, both embarrassing him due to his shyness and encouraging him to continue. He carried this love of writing to college, attending Stanford University's growing selection of creative writing and English courses. However, the details of taking a full roster of requirements for graduation did not appeal to Steinbeck, so he left the University in 1925 without a degree, having taken the courses that interested him over six years.

Steinbeck's early work and writing as an independent adult were varied and difficult. He worked at odd jobs, including construction work, journalism, as a winter caretaker for a Tahoe estate, and finally in a Tahoe fish hatchery. Throughout this assortment of jobs, Steinbeck tried to write in his free time. The job as a winter caretaker for a Tahoe vacation estate afforded him the most time to write; he finished his first novel-length manuscript, isolated in his cabin after long winters. This became The Cup of Gold (1929). While working at the hatchery the following summer, Steinbeck met Carol Henning, who would become his first wife. The couple married on January 14, 1930, in a courthouse ceremony.

Together, they lived as long as they could in Los Angeles until the money ran out, forcing them to move to the Steinbeck family vacation cottage in Pacific Grove. There, Carol worked a series of odd jobs herself, putting her skills as a secretary to good use, while Steinbeck wrote as much as he could. During this early period of his writing career, Steinbeck wrote The Pastures of Heaven, stories that became part of The Red Pony, The Long Valley, and To a God Unknown. However, his first commercial success came with the publication of Tortilla Flat. This was Steinbeck's first book published with his new publisher and editor, Pascal Covici. He would remain Steinbeck's friend and editor until his death in 1964.

After this turning point in Steinbeck's career, he started work on some of the best-known pieces, including In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men, and the crowning achievement, The Grapes of Wrath. At its publication in 1939, The Grapes of Wrath was a controversial book. Steinbeck felt that it plagued the rest of his career: everyone from his literary agents to the reading public was waiting for another Grapes of Wrath. Unfortunately, after fame and fortune came to his life, Steinbeck's marriage to Carol wavered and fell apart. They divorced in 1943, freeing Steinbeck to marry Gwyndolyn "Gwyn" Conger, whom he had met several years before.

With the dawning of the 1940's, Steinbeck turned to the growing war effort, producing propaganda pieces supporting the American war effort. The Moon is Down rose to a level of prominence in Europe it never achieved in the United States. For occupied Europe, it became a well-loved work, passed clandestinely from reader to reader even when it could earn them a prison or death sentence. In 1943, Steinbeck experienced war for himself as a war correspondent, writing for the New York Herald Tribune and syndicated in every state except Oklahoma. Upon returning from the war, Steinbeck felt the need for something different. During the war, his injuries and experiences put him in a dark mood that lasted for many months afterward.

Finally moving out of his dark mood, Steinbeck wrote Cannery Row, a book that, in a 1953 essay, Steinbeck says that the soldiers asked for: something funny and not about the war, as they were sick of war. In this post-war period, Steinbeck also returned to pre-war material from his 1940 trip to Baja California, where he and Ed Ricketts went on a trip to collect marine specimens. The Pearl was the result of this tour of his recent past, a novella together with a film by Mexican director Emiliano Fernandez. He also wrote The Wayward Bus, which has its roots in Steinbeck's time in Mexico.

However, two tragedies struck quickly in 1948: Ed Ricketts died from injuries sustained in a car accident with an oncoming train, and Gwyn asked for a divorce. Later that year, Steinbeck returned to the cottage in Pacific Grove, where he spent much of his time in the 1930s. The following year, he received a visit from actress Ann Southern, who brought along her friend, Elaine Scott. She would become Steinbeck's third and last wife; the couple married less than a week after Elaine secured her divorce from actor Zachary Scott in December 1950. Then, in early 1951, Steinbeck turned to the "big novel" of his career, East of Eden, drawing on his own family history intertwined with the fictional Trask family. They play out a retelling of the Cain and Abel story. The novel took nearly a year to complete and was published in 1952.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Steinbeck and Elaine traveled widely. Steinbeck finally achieved his goal of supporting their travels through journalism, written about the places they visited. The trip that stood out most for Steinbeck was a ten-month stay in Somerset, England, where Steinbeck worked on a modernized version of the King Arthur stories he loved from his childhood. It stood incomplete for the rest of Steinbeck's life, though published posthumously in 1976. After months abroad for many years, Steinbeck turned back to his own country, writing about the United States in Travels With Charley and expressing his concern over moral decay in America in The Winter of our Discontent. Later, in America and Americans, Steinbeck returned to the issue of Americans, their culture, and what America was like in the mid-1960s. Although critical of excesses and moral laziness, Steinbeck was clearly sympathetic to Americans as a people and wrote about his belief in the potential Americans have for greatness.

In 1962, Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his body of work. His is "realistic and imaginative writing, combining as it does sympathetic humor and social perception," said Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy Anders Osterling in his presentation speech. In 1964, Steinbeck was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson, with whom the writer was personally acquainted.

Steinbeck's health continued to decline throughout the mid-sixties, and he eventually died at his home in New York City on December 20, 1968.

The National Steinbeck Center, a museum and cultural center in downtown Salinas, pays tribute to his life and lasting impact on American letters and American identity. The Steinbeck Museum explores his ecological vision, his commitment to social engagement, and his many stories about the working class-all of which ensure his work is deeply relevant today. Steinbeck's books have been published in more than 45 languages, and he is, truly, a citizen of Salinas as well as a citizen of the world.

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John Steinbeck Bio Young Authors Archives Resources News Steinbeck Academic Conference John Steinbeck Bio John Steinbeck Bio John Steinbeck was born in Salinas in 1902 to a middle-class family living a few blocks from Salinas' bustling Main Street. His father, John Ernst Sr., worked as a manager in the local flour mill.

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Marsh was a keen observer of people and his exuberant, documentary style paintings are unique in their focus on crowds rather than individuals.