Writing was, indeed, his passion, not only during the Stanford years but throughout his life. He was a writer, but he was that and nothing else" (Benson 69). The President of the English Club said that Steinbeck, who regularly attended meetings to read his stories aloud, "had no other interests or talents that I could make out. To please his parents he enrolled at Stanford University in 1919 to please himself he signed on only for those courses that interested him: classical and British literature, writing courses, and a smattering of science. Respectable Salinas circumscribed the restless and imaginative young John Steinbeck and he defined himself against "Salinas thinking." At age fourteen he decided to be a writer and spent hours as a teenager living in a world of his own making, writing stories and poems in his upstairs bedroom. While the elder Steinbecks established their identities by sending roots deep in the community, their son was something of a rebel. Steinbeck a member of the Order of the Eastern Star and founder of The Wanderers, a women's club that traveled vicariously through monthly reports.
Never wealthy, the family was nonetheless prominent in the small town of 3,000, for both parents engaged in community activities. The observant, shy but often mischievous only son had, for the most part, a happy childhood growing up with two older sisters, Beth and Esther, and a much-adored younger sister, Mary. "I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer-and what trees and seasons smelled like." "I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers," he wrote in the opening chapter of East of Eden. As a child growing up in the fertile Salinas Valley -called the "Salad Bowl of the Nation" - Steinbeck formed a deep appreciation of his environment, not only the rich fields and hills surrounding Salinas, but also the nearby Pacific coast where his family spent summer weekends. His mother, the strong-willed Olive Hamilton Steinbeck, was a former teacher.
His father, John Ernst Steinbeck, was not a terribly successful man at one time or another he was the manager of a Sperry flour plant, the owner of a feed and grain store, the treasurer of Monterey County. John Steinbeck was born in the farming town of Salinas, California on 27 February 1902. Steinbeck in 1909 with his sister Mary, sitting on the red pony, Jill, at the Salinas Fairgrounds.
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