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Steinbeck’s novel excoriated the greed of the Associated Farmers, business interests in California. The Grapes of Wrath, his signature novel, published in 1939, traces the journey of the Joad family from Oklahoma to California, where they find not the fabled land of their dreams but a place with few jobs, low wages, and inadequate worker housing. In fact, Steinbeck would grow up to tell stories that many area Salinas Valley ranchers and farmers would rather not be told-embedded in his novels was Salinas gossip his characters were often lonely, misunderstood farmers and ranchers and in his books, dreams of ordinary workers are dashed-his books tell of failed dreams of land ownership in California. I can see how I would like to do it so that it would be the valley of the world.” In 1952 he published his epic novel about the Salinas Valley, E ast of Eden. A strong sense of place is evident in his fiction: “I think I would like to write the story of this whole valley,” he wrote to a friend in 1933, when he was 31 years old, “of all the little towns and all the farms and the ranches in the wilder hills. The geography and demographics of the valley, the “Salad Bowl of the Nation,” stamped the young boy’s sensibilities.
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During his childhood, Salinas had a population of about 5000, was the county seat of Monterey County, and a trading and shipping center for the lower Salinas Valley. John Steinbeck was born in Salinas in 1902, in a stately home on Central Ave (now open as a popular luncheon spot). Lettuce became the “green gold” of the Salinas Valley. By the time he went to college in 1919, the valley was about to ship lettuce across America in refrigerated railroad cars. Growing wheat and barley in the 19 th century, sugar beets in the late 1890s and vegetables and lettuce in the opening decades of the 20 th century, growers and shippers’ fortunes would soar during John Steinbeck’s childhood and teens. Only fifteen miles from the Pacific, the 50-mile long Salinas Valley was cool and often foggy, temperatures moderate, and the soil rich beyond measure. In 1902, Salinas, California was a prosperous farming community, founded about fifty years earlier.