Cup of Gold

John Steinbeck was an American author, born in 1902 in Salinas, California. He decided to become a writer at the age of fourteen, often locking himself in his bedroom to write poems and stories. In 1919, Steinbeck enrolled at Stanford University, but the budding writer would prove to have little use for college. Over the next six years, Steinbeck drifted in and out of school, eventually dropping out for good in 1925 without a degree. He wrote thirty-three books, including his landmark Pulitzer Prize–winning work The Grapes of Wrath (1939) the multigenerational epic East of Eden (1952), and the novella Of Mice and Men (1937). His work often dealt with the social and economic issues of the downtrodden everyman, particularly in his native West Coast.