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East of Eden Author Biography

John Ernst Steinbeck was born February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California, the son of John Ernst Steinbeck and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck. Steinbeck graduated from Salinas High School in 1919, and enrolled at Stanford University. He attended classes sporadically but left the university in 1925 without a degree. He moved to New York City to pursue a career as a writer but met with little success. Returning to California, he married Carol Henning in 1930.

Steinbeck supported himself by doing various odd jobs, including caretaker of an estate and fruit-picker. His first novel Cup of Gold (1929) went largely unnoticed and did not even recoup the very small advance the publisher gave him. Two subsequent novels The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933) fared no better. The first of Steinbeck's novels to attract attention was Tortilla Flat (1935), which received the Commonwealth Club of California's...
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