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Covered Road, Near Salinas
In 1939 a local writer published a booked based upon a series of articles he had written for the San Francisco Chronicle. Those articles highlighted the struggles of migrant farm laborers. One year later that book, The Grapes of Wrath received the Pulitzer Prize. The author was of course John Steinbeck who had grown up in Salinas, about 80 miles south of San Francisco.

As a young man Steinbeck had spent six years at Stanford University, taking only classes that appealed to him and with no interest in earning a degree. Afterwards he traveled the country before returning to the Northern California where he wrote a number of books including Of Mice and Men and later Cannery Row.

Steinbeck's work led to a political backlash against the him. He was seen as too liberal and some counties school boards even banned his books. However in 1962, Steinbeck won the Nobel prize for literature for his “realistic and imaginative writing, combining as it does sympathetic humor and keen social perception.” Two years later he was awarded the United States Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Steinbeck died in 1968 and his ashes were interred in his hometown of Salinas.
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