Steinbeck JohnIV

American journalist and author, also noted as the second child of the Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck. In 1965, he was drafted into the United States Army and served in Vietnam. He worked as a journalist for Armed Forces Radio and TV, and as a war correspondent for the United States Department of Defense. Steinbecks Vietnam memoir In Touch was published by Knopf in 1969. He wrote about his experiences with the Vietnamese and GIs. Steinbeck took the vows of a Buddhist monk while living on Phoenix Island in the Mekong Delta, under the tutelage of the politically powerful Coconut Monk, a silent tree-dwelling Buddhist yogi who adopted Steinbeck as a spiritual son. Amid the raging war, Steinbeck stayed in the monks "peace zone", where the 400 monks who lived on the island hammered howitzer shell casings into bells. In 1990, Steinbeck was diagnosed with a ruptured disc. He underwent corrective surgery on 7 February 1991 in Encinitas, California and died immediately after the operation. He was 44. In 2001, his posthumous memoir The Other Side of Eden: Life With John Steinbeck was published by Prometheus Books. Link to Wikipedia biography Read less