John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California, in 1902. He graduated from Salinas High School in 1919 and studied English literature at Stanford University, which he left in 1925 without a degree. He is best known for works about working-class and migrant lives.
His books include Tortilla Flat (1935), Of Mice and Men (1937), The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Cannery Row (1945), East of Eden (1952) and The Winter of Our Discontent (1961). He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964, and he died in New York in 1968.