John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California in 1902, and spent most of his life in Monterey County, the setting for many of his works. He attended Stanford University on and off between 1920 and 1926. Steinbeck did not graduate from Stanford, choosing instead to support himself through manual labor while continuing to write. His experiences among the working class in California lend authenticity to his accounts of the lives of the workers themselves, who are the central characters in his most important novels.
Steinbeck's first novel, The Gold Cup, was published in 1929, followed by The Grasslands of Heaven and, in 1933, To an Unknown God. However, his first three novels failed...
