John S
teinbeck, in full John Ernst Steinbeck (born Feb. 27, 1902, Salinas, Calif., U.S.—died Dec. 20, 1968, New York, N.Y.), American novelist, best known for The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which summed up the bitterness of the Great Depression decade and aroused widespread sympathy for the plight of migratory farmworkers. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1962.
Steinbeck attended Stanford University, Stanford, Calif., intermittently between 1920 and 1926 but did not take a degree. Before his books attained success, he spent considerable time supporting himself as a manual labourer while writing, and his experiences lent authenticity to his depictions of the lives of the workers in his stories. He spent much of his life in Monterey county, Calif., which later was the setting of some of his fiction.
Steinbeck’s reputation rests mostly on the naturalistic novels with proletarian themes he wrote in the 1930s; it is in these works that his building of rich symbolic structures and his attempts at conveying mythopoeic and archetypal qualities in his characters are most effective.
Image Credit: "Ed Ricketts and the 'Dream' of Cannery Row: The Legacy of Steinbeck's 'Doc' Endures in Monterey"
"Steinbeck speaks to us with special immediacy because in a curious way he anticipated attitudes toward the human experience which have particularly engaged the intelligences of the young in recent years. Many of Steinbeck's characters seem to have been the forebears of the rebels who have gathered in centers of protest from Greenwich Village to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Fancisco."
James Gray, John Steinbeck
The Genesis of Fiction: Modern Novelists as Biblical Interpreters by 
A Journey into Steinbeck's California by 
John Steinbeck Goes to War: The Moon is Down as Propoganda by 
The Short Novels of John Steinbeck: Critical Essays with a Checklist to Steinbeck Criticism by 
Conversations with John Steinbeck by 
