Home » Visual & Performing Arts » Art Museums » The National Steinbeck Center

The National Steinbeck Center

© Judith Stock

In high school, like so many other teenagers, I received the classic reading assignment The Grapes of Wrath. If you did too then you're already familiar with John Steinbeck and his unique and descriptive style of writing. Dedicated to the spirit of the celebrated novelist, the National Steinbeck Center in the Salinas Valley, northern California, is also dedicated to the people of the area who figured so prominently in Steinbeck's novels like Cannery Row and Of Mice and Men.

Located in the heart of old town Salinas, just 20 miles north of the Monterey Peninsula and 105 miles south of San Francisco, the museum includes John Steinbeck's birthplace and boyhood home turned restaurant. Built in 1897 the two-story frame dwelling is located two blocks west of Main Street on the corner of Central Avenue and Stone Street. Purchased by Steinbeck's parents in 1900, Steinbeck was born in the house on February 27, 1902.

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, he attended Stanford University as an English major but left the university setting to purse his writing career in New York in 1925. His first two novels were not well received by the literary public. Tortilla Flat, published in 1935, marked the turning point in Steinbeck's writing career. Throughout his life he remained a relatively private person, marrying three times. He passed away in New York in 1968, with his ashes being placed in the Garden of Memories Cemetery in Salinas.

Excerpt from John Steinbeck's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech: "Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species...the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit."

The 20th Anniversary Steinbeck Festival will take place this year from August 3rd to August 6th, 2000. Some of the highlights of the festival include the following: Join Center docents for a stroll through the author's city of his birth and youth. In the center of town glimpse into Bell's Candy Shop from Steinbeck's book East of Eden and see the J.E. Steinbeck's Feedstore, where John's father tried his hand as shopkeeper. Feel like a member of the family when you participate in a home-cooked meal in the Queen Anne-style house where Steinbeck was born. Sign up for a walking tour of Cannery Row in Monterey where the author spent time formulating his characters and setting for his book. Be sure to also visit the Red Pony Ranch where Steinbeck spent much of his boyhood and is thought to be the setting for his novel The Red Pony.

The copyright of the article The National Steinbeck Center in Art Museums is owned by Judith Stock. Permission to republish The National Steinbeck Center in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.