Acclaimed Author, Nobel Prize Honoree in Literature and Pulitzer Prize Recipient. John Steinbeck, an American author of the 20th century, received worldwide professional recognition after being awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for Literature.
According to the Nobel Prize committee, Steinbeck received the coveted award "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception." He impacted the world with his writings being translated into nearly 50 languages.
Although Steinbeck was a prolific writer who wrote 30 novels and a host of short stories and anthologies, he was best-known for his 1939 novel "The Grapes of Wrath," which summed-up the bitterness of the American Great Depression, arousing empathy for the plight of migratory farmworkers, who traveled penniless from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to California. His frequent topic was the plight of the misfits, homeless, and hopeless.
It has been suggested that Steinbeck considered
such societal outcasts as "God's Unfinished Children" since he often includes characters such as Lenny (Mice and Men)and The Preacher (Grapes of Wrath)in his works to remind the world of their value as human beings.
In 1940 , John Steinbeck was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for "The Grapes of Wrath."
In 1941, relying upon their shared knowledge of marine biology, John Steinbeck
along with his best friend and colleague Edward "Doc" Ricketts and after a rugged scientific specimen collection boat trip from Monterey, California to La Paz, Mexico co-authored a journal that published successfully as "The Log From The Sea of Cortez", a study of the fauna of the Gulf of California to The Baja Peninsula of Mexico. During World War II, Steinbeck was assigned as a newspaper war correspondent for the "New York Tribune".
Later, Steinbeck bravely brought his advocacy for peace to Viet Nam during wartime.

Born John Ernst Steinbeck Jr., the son of a feedstore owner, who was Monterey County's treasurer, his mother was a schoolteacher. Steinbeck studied English and marine biology at Stanford University for six years but never graduated even though Stanford proudly displays his photograph on the walls of The Stanford Faculty Club as a celebrated alum.
During the summer while at Stanford, Steinbeck worked the fields with the migrant workers, learning their fate first hand.
This was reflected in his early novels, which were about actual people he knew. With his first three books being unsuccessful, Steinbeck became widely-known in 1935 with "Tortilla Flat," a series of humorous stories about Mexican migrants.
In 1942, "Tortilla Flat" was adapted to a film. and after that, Steinbeck often wrote screenplays for adaptations of his novels.
Another of his screenplays written for film was based upon his 1955 novel, "East of Eden," which had James Dean as a lead actor.
Dean was later nominated for an Academy Award for this performance which was received posthumously because of James Dean's untimely death.
Though John Steinbeck is generally remembered as a native Californian, he had homes in Manhattan, New York City and on Long Island, living in New York half of his life.
In 1968, he was diagnosed with arteriosclerosis, which required bypass heart surgery. Often photographed with a cigarette in his mouth, Steinbeck declined the option of surgery, remaining instead in his Manhattan apartment dying quietly with his wife Elaine, the love of his life, lying beside him at age sixty-six.
John Steinbeck's cremains were interred with his mother's in her gravesite with their family in Salinas, California.
In a tribute to Steinbeck, world-renowned actor Henry Fonda, who starred as Tom Joad in the 1940 film that was adapted from Steinbeck's award-winning novel "The Grapes of Wrath and since a personal friendship between the two developed during the film making as Steinbeck was involved in production approval, Henry Fonda read several of Steinbeck's favorite poems at his memorial service.
John Steinbeck married three times, and had two sons ( both now deceased) with his second wife.
One of his sons Thomas became a celebrated author in his own right, and even resembled his father enough to be mistaken for his double at a Steinbeck National Research Center's Annual Birthday Celebration years ago when Thomas lit the candles on the cake for
John Steinbeck in his hometown of Salinas, California.
As a landmark legacy, The Steinbeck House, the Salinas home of the Steinbeck family, has been fully restored in its original beauty with antique furnishings and nostalgic photographs
offers Steinbeck devotees a gourmet restaurant, mini-museum, and a "Best Cellar" bookshop located just a few blocks from National Steinbeck Center.
A Steinbeck Commemorative stamp was issued by the United States Postal Service in 1979.
Thirty years after his death, the National Steinbeck Center, a museum and cultural center in downtown Salinas, opened to pay tribute to his life.
In 1992, his 1937 novel "Of Mice and Men" was also adapted to film, and was directed by Gary Sinise who played a lead role alongside John Malkovich.
In 2019, as a rare epitaph to John Steinbeck, an old storage locker full of unfinished manuscripts, letters from celebrities, decorative objects, and most significantly, a "warm-up journal" of Steinbeck's was offered at auction with "pencil-written, well-worn pages filled with cigarette burn holes amidst a treasury of Steinbeck stories
yet to told in an eloquence achievable only by John Steinbeck.