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Essay on The Chrysanthemums By John Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck (1902-1968), American author and winner of the Nobel Prize in 1962, was a leading exponent of the proletarian novel and a prominent spokesman for the victims of the Great Depression.
John Steinbeck was born on Feb. 27, 1902, in Salinas, Calif., the son of a small-town politician and schoolteacher. He worked as a laboratory assistant and farm laborer to support himself through 6 years of study at Stanford University, where he took only those courses that interested him, without seeking a degree. In 1925 he traveled to New York (by way of the Panama Canal) on a freighter, collecting impressions for his first novel. Cup of Gold (1929) was an unsuccessful attempt at psychological romance involving the pirate Henry Morgan.(Web,1)
ohn Steinbeck wrote The Chrysanthemums in 1938. Steinbeck, as in many of his novels and short stories, depicts the life of poor, hard working people. In The Chrysanthemums, Steinbeck writes about a farmer’s wife living in California. The couple lives on a farm, as many individuals did in that time. Steinbeck describes the physical and mental hardships of families living off the land. In the short story, The Chrysanthemums, Elisa is constantly with held from life because she is a woman. “On every side it (the valley) sat like a lid on the mountains and made of the great valley a closed pot.”
Under the lid was Salinas Valley, the home of Henry and Elisa Allen. Henry was a farmer who made a fair amount of money from his crops and stock. Elisa was Henry’s wife; she had the hobby of taking care of her Chrysanthemums and the chore of being Henry’s wife. In Elisa’s garden, the Chrysanthemums grew with the work of her hands and the care of her heart. She seems to enjoy her garden immensely, but actually was trapped in it....
