It’s the birthday of John Steinbeck, born in Salinas, CA, in 1902, and winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize for Literature. Steinbeck is best known for his novels of the 1930s exploring the hardships of migrant farm workers, and some feel that he won the Nobel on the strength of his best-known novel, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), alone. (Later he was revealed to be a “compromise choice” for the award; read about it here.)

Steinbeck had three sisters but a perfectly happy childhood. He grew up with a love for the land and a love for reading and writing; he worked on local ranches and with migrant workers, and knew by adolescence that he wanted to be a writer. So he came by all that worker-of-the-land-hardship-stuff honestly. He futzed around studying English at Stanford but dropped out for good in 1925, went to New York to make it as a writer, failed, returned to California in 1928, married his first wife Carol in 1930, and got financial help from Daddy while trying to write.

His first novels sort of sank without a trace, but in 1935 he published Tortilla Flats about the adventures of a gang of *paisanos* in Monterey after WWI. The book was a success and was followed by In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and The Grapes of Wrath (1939), or, as a Japanese book store owner in Yokohama once called it when talking with Steinbeck’s third wife Elaine, The Angry Raisins. These three became known as Steinbeck’s “Dustbowl Trilogy.” The latter two have been both widely taught and frequently banned; according to the American Library Association, Of Mice and Men was the sixth most frequently banned book in the U.S. between 1990 and 2004.

While collaborating on a nonfiction book, The Sea of Cortez (1941), with his marine biologist friend Ed Ricketts, his marriage to Carol was failing; they divorced in 1942. With second wife Gwyndolyn he had two sons, Thomas and John, but they divorced in 1948. He married Elaine in 1950 and their marriage lasted until his death in 1968. While Steinbeck was still writing a great deal (among others, Cannery Row in 1945, The Pearl in 1947), things kind of went downhill and his later works are not considered by most critics to be on a par with his work of the 1930s. But Steinbeck believed his family saga East of Eden (1952) to be his greatest work.

TRIGGER WARNING: the following information may be disillusioning. In 1960, ill and trying to revitalize his writing, Steinbeck traveled across 40 states with his dog Charley in a pickup-cum-camper to get in touch with the common man. The resultant book, Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962), was a huge success. But in 2010, Bill Steigerwald, a retired newspaperman and libertarian, set out to retrace Steinbeck’s journey and found to his surprise that a lot of it was completely false—Steinbeck wasn’t camping (he stayed in hotels most of the time), often wasn’t alone (Carol was along), and many/most conversations with rustic locals were probably completely made up. (The takeaway: you just can’t trust fiction writers.)

Have a bright, chilly, warm-inside Tuesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data. Unlike Steinbeck, in that one case.