John Steinbeck. The Voice of the Land

John Steinbeck was born in 1902 in California's Salinas River Valley. Although he worked briefly as a reporter in New York, it was in the Salinas Valley that he spent the Depression years, and his experiences and the people he met became the basis for his books. Of Mice and Men opened the eyes of the public to the desperate lives of the migrant workers. The Grapes of Wrath told the story of the destitute Oklahoma dust bowl farmers who flocked to the Valley in search of work, Cannery Row painted the rough and tumble lives of the cannery workers in nearby Monterey. And East of Eden, his most personal novel, revolved around the lives of two families from the Valley whose story was a tragic metaphor for the suffering humans needlessly cause one another.
Steinbeck was the recipient of both the Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes for Literature and was named to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. His books were likewise embraced by the...