Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902 in Salinas, California. He was of German, English and Irish descent. Johann Adolf Großsteinbeck (1828–1913), Steinbeck's paternal grandfather, shortened the family name to Steinbeck when he emigrated to the United States. The family farm in Heiligenhaus, Mettmann, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, is still called "Großsteinbeck". His father, John Ernst Steinbeck (1862-1935), was treasurer of Monterey County. John's mother, Olive Hamilton (1867-1934), a former school teacher, shared Steinbeck's passion for reading and writing. The Steinbecks were members of the Episcopal Church, although Steinbeck later became an agnostic. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essaySteinbeck lived in a small rural town, nothing more than a frontier settlement, located in some of the most fertile land in the world. He spent his summers working on nearby ranches and later with migrant workers on Spreckels' sugar beet farms. There he learned the harsher aspects of migrant life and the darker side of human nature, which provided him with material expressed in works such as Of Mice and Men. He explored his surroundings, walking through forests, fields and local farms. While working at Spreckels Sugar Company, he sometimes worked in their laboratory, which gave him time to write. He had considerable mechanical aptitude and a passion for repairing things he owned. The Steinbeck House at 132 Central Avenue, Salinas, California, the Victorian home where Steinbeck spent his childhood. Steinbeck graduated from Salinas High School in 1919 and went on to study English literature at Stanford University near Palo Alto, leaving him without a degree in 1925. He went to New York City where he took odd jobs while trying to write. When he failed to publish his work, he returned to California and in 1928 worked as a tour guide and caretaker at Lake Tahoe, where he met Carol Henning, his first wife. They married in January 1930 in Los Angeles, where, with friends, he attempted to make money by producing plaster mannequins. When their money ran out six months later due to a slow market, Steinbeck and Carol moved back to Pacific Grove, California, to a cottage her father owned on the Monterey Peninsula, just a few blocks outside the Monterey city limits . John free accommodation, paper for his manuscripts and, from 1928, loans that allowed him to write without looking for work. During the Great Depression, Steinbeck purchased a small boat and later claimed that he could live off the fish and crabs he harvested from the sea and fresh vegetables from his garden and local farms. When these sources failed, Steinbeck and his wife took welfare and, on rare occasions, stole bacon from the local produce market. Whatever food they had, they shared it with their friends. Carol became the model for Mary Talbot in Steinbeck's novel Cannery Row. In 1930, Steinbeck met marine biologist Ed Ricketts, who became a close friend and mentor to Steinbeck over the next decade, teaching him much about philosophy and biology. ] Ricketts, usually very quiet, but personable, with an inner self-sufficiency and an encyclopedic knowledge of different subjects, became the center of Steinbeck's attention. Ricketts had taken a college course with Warder Clyde Allee, a biologist and ecological theorist, who would go on to write a classic textbook on ecology. Ricketts became an advocate of ecological thinking, in which man was only part of the great chain of being, caught in a web of life too large for him to..