Many writers have chronicled the struggles of everyday Americans, and John Steinbeck did so with a deep compassion. Born in 1902 in the farming town of Salinas, California, Steinbeck grew up watching the lives of working-class people. He also lived a modest early life, and his early experiences deeply influenced his writing. This was perhaps most evident in The Grapes of Wrath (1939), his searing novel about Dust Bowl migrants and systemic injustice that cemented his legacy and won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1940.

Steinbeck knew at a young age that he wanted to be a writer, but he took a circuitous path to get there. After studying at Stanford University for six years, he left without a degree and instead took on a number of jobs: construction, caretaker at a private Lake Tahoe estate, bus driver, and journalist, including a stint as a World War II correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. These experiences ultimately helped Steinbeck hone the keen societal insight of other seminal works such as Of Mice and Men and East of Eden. Steinbeck died at age 66 in 1968 — but not before being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962.