John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck was born in 1902 in Salinas, California, and grew up in the fertile Salinas Valley, the setting of much of his fiction. He studied English at Stanford intermittently for several years without taking a degree, working in between on ranches and in labouring jobs that brought him into contact with the migrant workers he would write about. His first novel, Cup of Gold, appeared in 1929. In 1930 he met the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, whose ecological view of life — seeing people, like tide-pool creatures, as parts of larger wholes — profoundly shaped his thinking.

Success came with Tortilla Flat, a comic tale of Monterey’s paisanos, followed by In Dubious Battle, about a strike among fruit pickers, and Of Mice and Men. The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which followed an Oklahoma family driven west by the Dust Bowl, was a sensation: a Pulitzer Prize winner, a target of fury among growers and their allies, and a lasting fixture of American memory. With Ricketts he sailed the Gulf of California and wrote Sea of Cortez. Cannery Row returned to Monterey with affectionate comedy, while East of Eden, a multigenerational saga set in the Salinas Valley, he regarded as his most ambitious book.

Steinbeck worked as a war correspondent during the Second World War and continued to write journalism throughout his life. His last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent, appeared in 1961, and Travels with Charley recorded a journey around America with his poodle. The Nobel Prize in 1962 drew sceptical comment from some critics, who felt his best work lay behind him. He died in New York in 1968.