When Steinbeck quit college, what occupation did he decide to focus on?

It's pretty clear that John Steinbeck always intended to be a writer. At Stanford, which he attended off and on for six years from 1919 to 1925, he concentrated on creative writing courses without focusing on achieving a degree. In the biography John Steinbeck, Writer, Jackson J. Benson argues that Steinbeck was one of the few great writers of his generation who actually received training in a college creative-writing curriculum. One of the professors who had a profound effect on Steinbeck's writing was his short story teacher Edith Ronald Mirrielees, who convinced the young Steinbeck to avoid wordiness and ornamentation in his prose. She also urged him to be careful in his revisions in order to say what he truly meant. 

After leaving Stanford in 1925, Steinbeck moved to New York City with the idea of being a journalist. For a short time, he made a meager living writing for the New York American and doing construction work, most notably as a laborer on the building of Madison Square Garden. Steinbeck's sojourn in New York was short lived as he soon returned to California, living and working near Lake Tahoe, where he wrote his first novel, the commercially unsuccessful Cup Of Gold. Eventually, Steinbeck gained success with novels such as Tortilla Flat, In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men, and finally fame and wealth with the publication of his masterpiece, Grapes of Wrath, in 1939.