John Steinbeck at Stanford

John Steinbeck is California's great writer of farmworkers, canneries and the Salinas Valley. He is not usually filed under Stanford. Yet he spent parts of six years at the university, more time than many graduates. He never finished. He took the classes he wanted, skipped the ones he did not and left in 1925 to try his luck in New York. Along the way he met a teacher who changed how he wrote and a friend who stayed with him for life.

This page gathers what is documented about Steinbeck's Stanford years, chiefly from a 2012 Stanford Daily feature, a 2012 Stanford Magazine article and published records of his letters. Where sources disagree, we say so.

From Salinas to the Farm

John Ernst Steinbeck was born in Salinas on February 27, 1902. His father was the Monterey County treasurer and his mother a former schoolteacher. He was a reader and a scribbler from his teens.

He enrolled at Stanford in 1919. Kevin Hearle, a Stanford alumnus and Steinbeck scholar quoted by the Stanford Daily, said he went mainly to satisfy his mother: "He wasn't excited about it. He didn't see why he needed a college education to be a writer." Biographers place him in Encina Hall, the big freshman dormitory, during his first year.

Six years, 93 units

Steinbeck treated Stanford like a buffet. He signed up for English and writing classes and for subjects he thought would help him write. When a class bored him he often dropped it before the final. His grades were poor. Art Ring, a former member of the Steinbeck Collectors Club, told the Daily that Steinbeck never intended to graduate.

He also came and went. Between stretches of school he worked, most famously on the Spreckels sugar ranches in the Salinas Valley. He labored beside migrant workers and sometimes worked in the company's laboratory, which left him time to write. Those months fed the books that made him famous a decade later.

By the Daily's count he spent six years at Stanford and piled up only 93 units, about the standing of a junior. A normal degree needed far more.

Edith Mirrielees and the short story class

Two English professors stand out in every account of his Stanford years: Margery Bailey and Edith Mirrielees. Mirrielees, a Stanford graduate herself, taught English from 1909 to 1944 and was best known for her creative writing classes. Her book Story Writing came out in 1939 and was expanded in 1947. Her students also included the novelists Allen Drury and Howard Pease.

"Edith Mirrielees was the first to spot Steinbeck's talent," Ring told the Daily. Steinbeck's own memory was sharper. In a 1962 letter to her, later widely reprinted, he recalled arriving in her class hoping to learn a secret formula for writing great short stories. "You canceled this illusion very quickly," he wrote. Mirrielees died at Stanford in June 1962, a few months before his Nobel Prize was announced.

Steinbeck's first published fiction also dates from these years. Steinbeck bibliographies list two short pieces in the Stanford Spectator, a campus literary magazine, in 1924.

A summer at Hopkins Marine Station

In the summer of 1923, Steinbeck enrolled at Hopkins Marine Station, Stanford's marine laboratory in Pacific Grove. Stanford Magazine reports that he took general zoology plus a course in classics and exposition. His zoology professor was C. V. Taylor. Steinbeck later told Hopkins ichthyologist Rolf Bolin that Taylor's ideas about ecology impressed him most.

The station's 1923 catalog promised "the possibility of observing and studying a large number of live animals." For Steinbeck it opened a lifelong habit of looking at people the way a biologist looks at a tide pool. Hearle called him "probably the most scientifically, especially biologically trained major American novelist of his time." Our page on Hopkins Marine Station covers the lab today.

The Ricketts question

Steinbeck's great friend and collaborator was the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, the model for "Doc" in Cannery Row. The 2012 Stanford Daily article says the two met at Hopkins during a summer session. Most biographies, including the summary on Wikipedia, date their meeting to 1930 in Monterey, years after Steinbeck left Stanford. We treat the later date as more reliable. Either way, Stanford had a hand in Ricketts's best-known book: Between Pacific Tides was published by Stanford University Press in 1939.

Dook Sheffield and the Den of Pegasus

His closest Stanford friend was Carlton Sheffield, whom he called "Dook." Sheffield graduated in 1923, earned a master's in 1930 and stayed in Steinbeck's life until the writer's death. He was best man when Steinbeck married his first wife, Carol Henning. He also once saved Steinbeck's life on a camping trip, according to the Daily.

In 1925, his last year, Steinbeck moved off campus to a one-room shack behind a larger house in Palo Alto. He loved it. Ring told the Daily that Steinbeck called it "the Den of Pegasus," a nod to the soaring ambitions of the young writers who gathered there. Later Steinbeck swapped the winged horse for a winged pig as his personal emblem. "I find I'm more a Pigasus than a Pegasus," he wrote, "a lumbering soul but trying to fly." No address for the shack has been published.

Leaving for New York

In 1925 Steinbeck left Stanford for good, without a diploma and with no plan to return. He went to New York City, took odd jobs and tried to write. It did not go well. He came back to California and in 1928 worked as a caretaker and tour guide at Lake Tahoe, where he met Carol Henning. His first novel, Cup of Gold, appeared in 1929.

The big books followed in the 1930s: Tortilla Flat, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. He died in New York on December 20, 1968.

Later links to Stanford

Steinbeck did not keep up much of a relationship with the university. In a 1964 letter to Sheffield, now in Stanford's Special Collections, he asked, "Do you ever go near Stanford? I don't think I would like to go." He added that he had "no call for the Groves of Academe."

Stanford kept a claim on him anyway. Two years after Mirrielees retired, Wallace Stegner launched the university's creative writing program. The Stegner Fellowships date from 1946. A later generation of writers, including Ken Kesey and Larry McMurtry, came through that program, a story told on our Perry Lane page.

• Papers: Stanford's Special Collections hold Steinbeck material, including the 1964 letter.
• Research: The Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University is the region's main Steinbeck research center. Our San Jose day trip covers the city.
• Steinbeck country: Cannery Row and the Monterey coast are a day trip away. See our Monterey and Carmel guide or Pacific Grove, home of Hopkins Marine Station.

For other writers with local ties, browse our page on Palo Alto in books.

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