John Steinbeck

Steinbeck grew up in Salinas, California, and worked as a ranch hand, surveyor, and fruit picker among the migrant laborers he later wrote about, dropping in and out of Stanford without finishing a degree. His close friendship with the marine biologist Ed Ricketts shaped his ecological, unsentimental view of human behavior and produced Cannery Row.

The Grapes of Wrath, based on his own reporting on Dust Bowl migrant camps, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and was investigated by the FBI, which suspected him of communist sympathies for decades afterward. He served as a war correspondent in Europe during the Second World War and later covered Vietnam as an aging supporter of the war, a position that cost him standing among younger readers.

He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, married three times, and died in New York in 1968.