Celebrated novelist John Steinbeck was born in 1902 in Salinas, California to a local politician father and a schoolteacher mother and had three sisters. Steinbeck spent his summers working on nearby ranches and farms, and this gave him the insight into the experiences of migrant workers that informed some of his most famous works including Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, and East of Eden. Steinbeck’s sense of place and connection to Salinas is evident in many of his writings. An avid young reader, Steinbeck wrote for his high school newspaper and later studied literature at Stanford from 1919 but did not graduate. He moved to New York City in 1925 to pursue writing but was unsuccessful in publishing.

Returning to California to live and work in Lake Tahoe in 1928, Steinbeck met his first wife, Carol Henning, and published his first novel, Cup of Gold, in 1929. The couple moved to Steinbeck’s parent’s summer house and lived modestly, Carol working odd jobs and Steinbeck continuing to write. To a God Unknown (1933) was written during this time as were a collection of short stories that would comprise The Pastures of Heaven (1932), The Red Pony (1933) and The Long Valley (1938).

Steinbeck’s first critical success came with the novella Tortilla Flat (1935) which was adapted to film. He would go on to write three books on labour issues in California, In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and his signature novel, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Despite its success, The Grapes of Wrath was controversial, and Steinbeck’s sympathy for the plight of migrant workers received criticism for its portrayal of the state and farmers, and for its gritty language.

Steinbeck and Carol’s marriage ended in divorce and Steinbeck married Gwendolyn Conger in 1943, with whom he had two children. During WW2, Steinbeck served as a war correspondent and continued to write and publish after the war. He wrote what he considered to be the ‘big work’ of his career, East of Eden, which was published in 1952, the final part of which was adapted to film starring James Dean in his debut performance.

For the novel The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Steinbeck earned the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he was awarded for his body of work in 1962. In 1964, Steinbeck was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson, with whom the writer was personally acquainted.

After a second divorce, Steinbeck remarried, for the third and final time, to Elaine Scott. Steinbeck’s health continued to deteriorate through the 1960s and he suffered increasingly frequent episodes that resembled mini-strokes, and eventually died at his home in New York City on December 20, 1968.