Episode Details

When John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, a reporter asked whether he deserved it and he answered no, an opinion the committee's later-declassified files quietly shared. This episode uncovers the contradictory man behind the classics: a middle-class kid from Salinas, son of the Monterey County treasurer, who chose grueling summers on sugar beet farms and ranches, dropped out of Stanford, failed in New York, went bankrupt making plaster mannequins, and during the Depression fished for dinner and shoplifted bacon with his first wife Carol in Pacific Grove.

We show how marine biologist Ed Ricketts gave him an ecological framework for writing people the way a scientist observes a tide pool, leading to Tortilla Flat, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. The backlash was fierce: bans in Kern County, book burnings in Salinas, and death threats that made him buy a handgun until Eleanor Roosevelt validated his reporting. The episode then follows him into World War II with the Beach Jumpers, his 1952 letter offering services to the CIA, East of Eden, Travels with Charley, his hawkish reporting from Vietnam and his death in 1968.

• Why Steinbeck adapted Of Mice and Men for the stage after seeing theater performed for illiterate workers
• How the Dust Bowl migration and Hooverville reporting fed directly into The Grapes of Wrath
• How a Pulitzer-winning novelist ended up holding a Thompson submachine gun off the Italian coast
• Why the loss of Ed Ricketts in 1948 and Cold War travels pushed his work into darker territory
• Why loyalty to his sons and Lyndon Johnson, not ideology, explains his stance on Vietnam