John Steinbeck

John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. (1902–1968) was an American writer, born in Salinas, California. He was of German and Irish descent. born on 27 February 1902, in Salinas, California. He was of German and Irish descent.

For most of the Great Depression and his marriage to Carol, Steinbeck lived in a cottage that was owned by his father in Pacific Grove, California, on the Monterey Peninsula a few blocks from the border of the city of Monterey, California. The elder Steinbeck supplied him with the lodging for free, with paper for his manuscripts, and critical loans beginning at the end of 1928 which allowed Steinbeck to give up a punishing warehouse job in San Francisco, and focus on his craft. During WWII Steinbeck served as a war correspondent accompanying the commando raids of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in the Mediterranean. In 1944, wounded by a close munitions explosion in North Africa, the war-weary author resigned from his work and returned home.

Steinbeck is best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden and Of Mice and Men but his first novel, Cup of Gold, published in 1929, is based on the life and death of privateer Henry Morgan. In 1962 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.