Happy Birthday, John Steinbeck

Filed in Books that Shaped Work in America by Carl Fillichio on February 27, 2014

One of America’s greatest authors, John Steinbeck, was born on this day in 1902. He won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize. Two of his works, “The Grapes of Wrath” and “Of Mice and Men,” are on the U.S. Department of Labor’s list of Books that Shaped Work in America. And for good reason.

Whenever I tell people about the Labor Department’s book project, one of the first questions I usually get is: “Is ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ on the list?” It is indeed. Recommended to the list by former Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis and members of the public, this title is among the quintessential books that shaped our collective view of work and workers in America.

John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. (February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) was an American author of twenty-seven books, including sixteen novels, six non-fiction books, and five collections of short stories. He is widely known for the comic novels Tortilla Flat (1935) and Cannery Row (1945), the multi-generation epic East of Eden (1952), and the novellas Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Red Pony (1937). The Pulitzer Prize-winning The Grapes of Wrath (1939), widely attributed to be part of the American literary canon, is considered Steinbeck's masterpiece. In the first 75 years since it was published, it sold 14 million copies.