John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California, and grew up in the farm country of the Salinas Valley. He studied English and marine biology at Stanford University on and off for six years but left without a degree. He worked on ranches, in a sugar beet factory and as a laborer while he tried to write.

His subject became the farm workers and poor people of California. Of Mice and Men (1937) follows George and Lennie, two migrant ranch hands who share a dream of owning a small farm. The short novel argues that loneliness is the normal state of the drifting worker and that friendship is the only defense against it. The Grapes of Wrath (1939) follows a family driven from Oklahoma by the Dust Bowl and won the Pulitzer Prize.

He reported from World War II as a war correspondent. His later books include East of Eden (1952). He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, a choice some critics questioned at the time. He died in New York City in 1968, aged 66.