Thomas Steinbeck
| Thomas Steinbeck | |
|---|---|
| Born | Thomas Myles Steinbeck August 2, 1944 New York, New York, U.S. |
| Died | August 11, 2016 (aged 72) Santa Barbara, California, U.S. |
| Occupation | Screenwriter and novelist |
| Nationality | American |
| Education |
California Institute of the Arts University of California, Los Angeles |
| Genre | Fiction, Screenplays |
| Relatives |
John Steinbeck (father) Gwyndolyn Conger (mother) John Steinbeck IV (brother) |
Thomas Myles Steinbeck (August 2, 1944 – August 11, 2016) was an American novelist, screenwriter, photographer, and journalist. He published numerous works of fiction, including short stories and novels. He was the elder son of American novelist John Steinbeck.
Thomas ("Thom") Steinbeck was born in Manhattan, New York City, to American novelist John Steinbeck and his second wife, singer-composer Gwyndolyn Conger on August 2, 1944. His younger brother John Steinbeck IV, was born two years later. His parents' marriage dissolved four years after he was born, and subsequently "Thom" spent a great deal of time with his father. He credited his father for instilling in him not only a passion for the works of the world’s great writers, but also a recognition of how language and the poetic rhythm of words affected individuals and society in general. "Thom" had a good relationship with his famous father, stating that he would rate him, "an eight-and-a-half or a nine" on a ten-point scale.
"Thom" was educated at a number of boarding schools on the east coast. As he told an interviewer in 2011:
“My mother was difficult, to put it lightly. She was a drinker. And the only way my father could save me from her was to put me into boarding schools on the East Coast from the time I was in third grade.”
When not in school or on holiday, he and his younger brother traveled widely with their father to Europe, Greece, North Africa. At one point, they spent a year traveling the world with a young teacher named Terrence McNally, who later gained acclaim as a playwright and won four Tony Awards and an Emmy. After high school, Steinbeck studied animation at the California Institute of the Arts, then went on to study film at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. However, the Vietnam War cut his studies short.
Steinbeck trained to serve with Armed Forces Radio and Television at Fort Knox, but arrived in Vietnam on the second day of the 1968 Tet Offensive and was immediately reassigned as a helicopter door gunner. Afterwards, he resumed work as a combat photographer (he once said that "we had a fantasy that somehow we could take the photograph that could stop the war") and returned to his original posting with AFVN as a television production specialist. After his service, he returned to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia as a journalist and photographer.
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