American novelist, Nobel laureate (1962), and — alongside Dos Passos and Richard Wright — the central literary chronicler of Depression-era American working life. Steinbeck grew up in the Salinas Valley of central California and spent his career returning to the agricultural migrant labor, the Dust Bowl refugees, the cannery workers, and the drifters of his native state. Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939) together made him, by the end of the 1930s, the American novelist most identified with the dignity of the rural poor.
The Grapes of Wrath — the journey of the Joad family from foreclosed Oklahoma to the labor camps of California — is his central achievement: a long novel written out of Steinbeck's own reporting on the migrant camps, structured around the slow political awakening of a displaced family, and organized by the theological conviction (voiced by the ex-preacher Casy) that "maybe all men got one big soul ever'body's a part of." The book was attacked as communist propaganda, banned in parts of California, and burned in Oklahoma; it won the Pulitzer in 1940 and has remained continuously in print since. East of Eden (1952), the big late family-and-Genesis novel Steinbeck considered his main work, is more ambitious and more uneven; The Pearl (1947) and Cannery Row (1945) are the compressed late-career masterpieces.
The nonfiction matters too. The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951), written with the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, is a sustained philosophical essay on ecological thinking disguised as a trip journal. Travels with Charley (1962), the late book about driving around America with his poodle, remains one of the best American road books. Steinbeck is sometimes condescended to by literary critics who find him sentimental and programmatic; the books have survived the criticism, and readers who care about whose American lives the American novel takes seriously keep returning to him.