John Steinbeck

John Ernst Steinbeck was an American writer and novelist who won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature for his realistic and imaginative writing combining sympathetic humor with keen social perception, and has been called a giant of American letters. Over his career he wrote 33 books including 16 novels, among them the comic novels Tortilla Flat (1935) and Cannery Row (1945), the multigenerational epic East of Eden (1952), and the novella Of Mice and Men (1937); The Grapes of Wrath (1939) won the Pulitzer Prize and is considered his masterpiece, selling 14 million copies by its 75th anniversary. Much of his work is set in his native central California, particularly the Salinas Valley, and explores themes of fate and injustice as they bear on downtrodden or everyman protagonists.