Biographical Context
Biography in Depth | Further Reading | Chronology | Prizes and Awards | Nobel Prize Speech
Brief Biography
Born in Salinas, California 1902-02-27, John Steinbeck remains the quintessential
California writer. Beginning in the 1930s, he forged a significant place in the culture
and letters of the United States as a writer deeply engaged with place, with marginalized
workers and ordinary people, and with the political and social human dramas that confronted
him. More than any other writer of the United States in the 1900s, he remained engaged
in the struggles of his country. He wrote social histories in the 1930s; deeply ecological
works in the 1940s; early accounts of the Cold War when covering the Soviet Union
in 1947; cultural studies of Mexico and Mexicans from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s;
and in the 1960s increasingly concerned essays about the people of the United States,
including accounts of the U.S. war in Vietnam. John Steinbeck, winner of the 1962
Nobel Prize, wrote as the conscience of his country for nearly 40 years. He died 1968-12-20
in his New York City apartment.