Instead, its purpose is impressionistic: to convey, in around 150 pages, the sense of belonging to a community - a very specific kind of community rooted in the author’s memories of his Californian upbringing. This short novel dispenses with the necessities of conventional narrative arcs. If you’re wondering where to start with this writer’s strong, clean prose, we’ve compiled a list of the 15 best John Steinbeck books. The Nobel-Prize-winning author consistently asked questions about right and wrong, and found fascinating subject matter in the many subtle shades of humanity’s good and evil. But if we had to choose a defining characteristic that unites all of his writing, it would have to be its undisputedly moral core. Portraying a side of California far removed from the glamorized depictions encountered in popular culture, Steinbeck writes about ordinary people: flawed, often morally dubious, always striving, sometimes despairing communities of misfits, migrants, and working people struggling through life.Īlways an experimenter, Steinbeck wrote in many forms: novellas, epic novels, short stories, and even nonfiction. Much of Steinbeck’s work takes place in the sun-drenched Salinas valley in California (now aptly known as ‘Steinbeck Country’), and is imbued with a deep connection to the natural world. Ecologically conscious before the urgency of climate change was widely discussed, but tender in its understanding of humankind’s many shortcomings, this literary giant’s work feels breathtakingly current in the present moment. John Steinbeck’s books possess that ever-elusive quality of timelessness. Today, more than thirty years after his death, he remains one of America's greatest writers and cultural figures.The 15 Best John Steinbeck Books Everyone Should Read Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, and, in 1964, he was presented with the United States Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Later books include Sweet Thursday (1954), The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957), Once There Was a War (1958), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), America and Americans (1966), and the posthumously published Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969), Viva Zapata! (1975), The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976), and Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (1989). The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he traveled widely. Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (1948), another experimental drama, Burning Bright (1950), and The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951) preceded publication of the monumental East of Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own familys history. He devoted his services to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play-novelette The Moon is Down (1942). The Grapes of Wrath won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1939.Įarly in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with The Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious student of marine biology with Sea of Cortez (1941). Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the California laboring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the book considered by many his finest, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Popular success and financial security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935), stories about Montereys paisanos. During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929).Īfter marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two California books, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later collected in The Long Valley (1938). In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. Both the valley and the coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. John Steinbeck, born in Salinas, California, in 1902, grew up in a fertile agricultural valley, about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast.