Born in Salinas, California in 1902 February, John Steinbeck remains the quintessential California writer. Beginning in the 1930s, he forged a significant place in the culture and letters of the United States as a writer deeply engaged with place, with marginalized workers and ordinary people, and with the political and social human dramas that confronted him. More than any other writer of the United States in the 1900s, he remained engaged in the struggles of his country. He wrote social histories in the 1930s; deeply ecological works in the 1940s; early accounts of the Cold War when covering the Soviet Union in 1947; cultural studies of Mexico and Mexicans from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s; and accounts of the U.S. war in Vietnam in the 1960s. John Steinbeck, winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize, wrote as the conscience of his country for nearly 40 years.