John Steinbeck

On February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California, John Steinbeck was born into a family rooted in the agricultural landscape of the Monterey region. He attended Stanford University intermittently, worked in manual jobs, and absorbed the lives of ranch workers, migrants, and small-town Californians. Those experiences provided the social material that defined his fiction.

Steinbeck published Of Mice and Men in 1937 and The Grapes of Wrath in 1939, turning Dust Bowl migration and labor exploitation into major literary subjects during the Great Depression. He also wrote documentary journalism on migrant camps and later served as a war correspondent during World War II. His books joined social protest, regional realism, and biblical cadence in a form that reached a mass audience.

Steinbeck's work influenced labor politics, documentary art, and the national memory of the Depression. The Grapes of Wrath remained central to school curricula, public history, and later debates over migration, agricultural capitalism, and human dignity.