

He had considerable mechanical aptitude and fondness for repairing things he owned.

While working at Spreckels Sugar Company, he sometimes worked in their laboratory, which gave him time to write. He explored his surroundings, walking across local forests, fields, and farms. There he learned of the harsher aspects of the migrant life and the darker side of human nature, which supplied him with material expressed in Of Mice and Men. He spent his summers working on nearby ranches and later with migrant workers on Spreckels sugar beet farms. Both valley and coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. Steinbeck lived in a small rural valley (no more than a frontier settlement) set in some of the world's most fertile soil, about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast. The Steinbecks were members of the Episcopal Church, although Steinbeck later became agnostic. John's mother, Olive Hamilton (1867–1934), a former school teacher, shared Steinbeck's passion for reading and writing. His father, John Ernst Steinbeck (1862–1935), served as Monterey County treasurer. The family farm in Heiligenhaus, Mettmann, Germany, is still named "Großsteinbeck". He arrived in the United States in 1858, shortening the family name to Steinbeck. Johann Adolf Großsteinbeck (1828–1913), Steinbeck's paternal grandfather, was a founder of Mount Hope, a short-lived messianic farming colony in Palestine that disbanded after Arab attackers killed his brother and raped his brother's wife and mother-in-law.

He was of German, English, and Irish descent. Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California. His works frequently explored the themes of fate and injustice, especially as applied to downtrodden or everyman protagonists. Most of Steinbeck's work is set in central California, particularly in the Salinas Valley and the California Coast Ranges region. In the first 75 years after it was published, it sold 14 million copies. The Pulitzer Prize-winning The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is considered Steinbeck's masterpiece and part of the American literary canon. He is widely known for the comic novels Tortilla Flat (1935) and Cannery Row (1945), the multi-generation epic East of Eden (1952), and the novellas The Red Pony (1933) and Of Mice and Men (1937). ( / ˈ s t aɪ n b ɛ k/ February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) was an American author and the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature winner "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception." He has been called "a giant of American letters." ĭuring his writing career, he authored 33 books, with one book coauthored alongside Edward Ricketts, including 16 novels, six non-fiction books, and two collections of short stories.
