"I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now only that place where the books are kept." - John Steinbeck.

John Steinbeck (1902- 1968) was born in Salinas, California. He studied at the relatively new Stanford University (opened in 1891) on and off between 1919 and 1925 and then went to New York where he worked as a reporter and bricklayer, before returning to California where he worked a variety of jobs. It was not until his fourth novel, Tortilla Flat in 1935 that he gained any real literary recognition. Dubious Battle followed the following year, and then Of Mice and Men (1937). Between 1937 and 1939 he lived and worked with migrants to California - the result of this experience being The Grapes of Wrath (1939).

During WWII he worked as a foreign correspondent (a role that he took up again during part of the Vietnam War (1966-67). He continued to write up until his death in 1968 but despite works such as Cannery Row (1945) and East of Eden (1952) his reputation declined in his later years. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.

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