John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck was an American writer born on 27 February 1902 in Salinas, California, and he died on 20 December 1968. The farms, valleys and coastal towns of his home region became the setting for much of his best work. He wrote about migrant workers, ranch hands, fishermen and drifters, treating people on the margins of society with sympathy and a keen eye for their dignity and hardship.

His novels and stories of the 1930s, written during the Great Depression, made his name, and he went on to write fiction, plays, journalism and travel books. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. Steinbeck matters because he joined plain, direct storytelling to a deep concern for fairness and community, and his books are still widely read in schools and beyond.