John Steinbeck is one of America’s most prominent literary voices. His novels and short stories defined his generation and are canonized in American literature.

John Steinbeck was born in 1902 in Salinas, California. The Salinas Valley is the foundational setting for most of his literature, including The Wayward Bus, though the town names Rebel Corner and San Juan are fictional. Steinbeck and his first wife Carol settled in Monterey in 1930. They were relatively poor, as the Great Depression rocked their employment prospects. In Monterey, Steinbeck met the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, who became a mentor, friend, and inspiration for characters in Steinbeck’s novels and a partner in his nonfiction book about marine life.

Steinbeck published his first novel, Cup of Gold, in 1929. He wrote several other stories and essays afterward, but he worked in relative obscurity until the 1935 publication of his novella Tortilla Flat. This novella explores a rag-tag group of friends struggling to make ends meet in an impoverished America. The social and human analysis in the novella became characteristic of Steinbeck’s literature, which exposes how society fails to nurture the potential of the human spirit.

In 1937, Steinbeck published the novella Of Mice and Men, which became a classic of American literature.