The Wayward Bus

John Steinbeck is one of America’s most prominent literary voices. His novels and short stories defined his generation and are canonized in American literature.

John Steinbeck was born in 1902 in Salinas, California. The Salinas Valley is the foundational setting for most of his literature, including The Wayward Bus, though the town names Rebel Corner and San Juan are fictional. Steinbeck and his first wife Carol settled in Monterey in 1930. They were relatively poor, as the Great Depression rocked their employment prospects. In Monterey, Steinbeck met the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, who became a mentor, friend, and inspiration for characters in Steinbeck’s novels and a partner in his nonfiction book about marine life.

Steinbeck published his first novel, Cup of Gold, in 1929. He wrote several other stories and essays afterward, but he worked in relative obscurity until the 1935 publication of his novella Tortilla Flat. This novella explores a rag-tag group of friends struggling to make ends meet in an impoverished America. The social and human analysis in the novella became characteristic of Steinbeck’s literature, which exposes how society fails to nurture the potential of the human spirit.

In 1937, Steinbeck published the novella Of Mice and Men, which became a classic of American literature. The novella, which centers on the friendship between the two male central characters, celebrates how people help and need one another while offering social criticism of the loneliness inherent in being a transient worker with no permanent home during the Great Depression.

In 1939, the publication of The Grapes of Wrath earned Steinbeck widespread fame. The Grapes of Wrath was the nation’s best-selling book that year, with millions of Americans reading Steinbeck’s fictionalized excoriation of the prejudices that formed against impoverished Americans during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl tragedies. Steinbeck was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Grape of Wrath.

While scholars have analyzed The Wayward Bus as uncharacteristic of Steinbeck’s usual tactful and subtle exploration of humanity, the 1947 novel was also one of his most financially successful publications.

In 1962, Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His contribution to American and world literature is far-reaching. Steinbeck’s use of realism, his study of human flaws, and his exploration of fate, injustice, free will, race issues, and system poverty engaged his readers for decades. Steinbeck uses setting, most predominately California, as a backdrop for the symbolism, themes, and character development of his works, including The Wayward Bus. Many of his short stories and novels have been adapted into successful Hollywood films, including East of Eden (1955), which starred James Dean.

Steinbeck’s stories, nonfiction narratives, and legacy live on as he is a staple in American high school English curricula. Still considered a giant in American literature, Steinbeck’s work has inspired other artists who strive to use their form as a way of raising awareness and motivating activism.