John Steinbeck

American · b. 1902

John Steinbeck chronicled California's working poor — Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath (Pulitzer, and burned in the counties it described) — then called everything practice for East of Eden, his Salinas Valley epic of choice and inheritance. The 1962 Nobel citation praised his 'keen social perception'; his research method was living in the ditches he wrote about.