About the Author:

JOHN STEINBECK was born in Salinas, California, in 1902. He grew up in a fertile agricultural valley about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast, the landscape that would serve as a setting for some of his best fiction.

In 1919 he went to Stanford University where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses. He left in 1925 without taking a degree. Over the next five years he supported himself as a labourer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929). After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two Californian books, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on the short stories which were later collected in The Long Valley (1938). Popular success and financial security only came with Tortilla Flat (1935), a collection of stories about Monterey's paisanos.

A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the Californian labouring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the book considered by many to be his finest, The Grapes of Wrath (1939).

Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a film-maker with The Forgotten Village (1941), his portrait of life in a Mexican village, and a serious student of marine biology with The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1941), his account of an expedition to the Gulf of Mexico. He then devoted his attention to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play-novelette The Moon is Down (1942). Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (1948), another experimental drama, Burning Bright (1950), and The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951) preceeded publication of the monumental East of Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family's history.

The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, Elaine Scott, with whom he travelled widely. Later books include Sweet Thursday (1954), The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957), Once There Was a War (1958), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels with Charley (1962) America and Americans (1966), and the posthumously published Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969), Viva Zapata! (1975), The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976), and Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (1989).

He died in 1968, having won a Nobel Prize in 1962.