John Steinbeck was an American author born in 1902 in Salinas, California. He showed an early love of literature encouraged by his mother and attended Stanford University before leaving without a degree. His early novels were ignored but his 1935 novel Tortilla Flat was successful, leading to his winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 for The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962 in recognition of his realistic and imaginative writings. He died in 1968 but his works, including Of Mice and Men set in his hometown of Salinas, continue to teach readers about the human experience.