Each book is defined by Steinbeck's sensitivity for common man - misfits, striking workers, a lonely ranch wife, piasanos, migrants who sought prosperity in the golden land. And each work of fiction is informed by the idea that people must be seen in the context of their environments. Early in the 1930s he wrote: "the trees and the muscled mountains are the world - but not the world apart from man - the world and man - the one inseparable unit man and his environment. Why they should ever have been understood as being separate I do not know." Steinbeck's California fiction, from apprenticeship novel, To a God Unknown (1932) through his epic treatment of the Salinas Valley, East of Eden (1952) - written after his move to New York City - envisions the dreams and defeats of common people as shaped by the magnificent land they inhabit.

Steinbeck gradually lost his compelling need to write about California's land and people when he moved east, first in 1942 after separating from Carol, his first wife; and finally in 1950, when he married Elaine Scott, his third wife. In the latter decades of his life, Steinbeck travelled extensively around the world, always writing. But the book that defined him, in America and throughout the world, has always been the last book he wrote in the 1930s, The Grapes of Wrath. In that novel he captured not only an historical moment - the plight of migrants who poured into California in the 1930s - but also the plight of any people in flight, any disposed, any homeless any powerless.

Click here to view a map of major places mentioned by Steinbeck in his California fiction.

Click here to read brief descriptions of places located in "Steinbeck Country."