John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California in 1902 and spent most of his life in Monterey County, the setting of much of his fiction. He attended Stanford University intermittently between 1920 and 1926. Steinbeck did not graduate from Stanford, but instead chose to support himself through manual labor while writing. His experiences among the working classes in California lent authenticity to his depiction of the lives of the workers who are the central characters of his most important novels.
Steinbeck's first novel, Cup of Gold, was published in 1929, followed by The Pastures of Heaven and, in 1933, To a God Unknown. However, his first three novels were unsuccessful both critically...
