John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck (1902-1968) grew up in Salinas, California, in a family of modest means and studied at Stanford without taking a degree. A few years of freelancing in New York went nowhere, so he went home to the valleys and the Monterey coast. Those places supplied most of his settings for the rest of his career.

His fiction keeps returning to rural labour, money trouble and the people caught between them, with a strong sense of the land underneath. The tone shifts a good deal. Tortilla Flat (1935), a run of comic stories about Monterey paisanos, gave him his first wide audience. In Dubious Battle (1936) follows a fruit pickers' strike. Cannery Row (1945) is a loose, affectionate portrait of a waterfront community, written partly as a tribute to his friend, the marine biologist Ed Ricketts.

The Grapes of Wrath won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1940. It was also attacked at the time, and Steinbeck was accused of communist sympathies. Later came East of Eden (1952), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961) and the travelogue Travels with Charley (1962). That same year the Swedish Academy gave him the Nobel Prize in Literature for writing that joined "sympathetic humour and keen social perception". Adaptations of his stories have earned nearly thirty Academy Award nominations.

Start with The Grapes of Wrath, which follows the Joad family from Oklahoma to California during the Depression. The Penguin Classics edition carries an introduction and notes by Robert DeMott, who has also edited Steinbeck's work for the Library of America. If you want something shorter first, try Of Mice and Men, which Steinbeck conceived as a cross between a novel and a play.