John Steinbeck

Biography

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) was an American novelist and Nobel Prize laureate whose fiction about the working poor, migrant laborers, and the American Dream made him one of the most widely read and beloved American authors of the twentieth century. Born in Salinas, California, Steinbeck attended Stanford University without graduating and worked as a laborer and journalist before achieving literary success. His masterworks—Of Mice and Men (1937), The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and East of Eden (1952)—combine social realism with mythic storytelling, creating narratives that are simultaneously rooted in specific California landscapes and universal in their exploration of human dignity, injustice, and the search for belonging. The Grapes of Wrath, about Dust Bowl migrants in California, won the Pulitzer Prize and remains one of the most powerful social novels in American literature. Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962 “for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception.” His early novel Cup of Gold (1929) explored the life of pirate Henry Morgan.