When John Steinbeck's novel East of Eden was a "work in progress", it was called "The Salinas Valley". The Salinas Valley is in northern California about 100 miles south of San Francisco. Angled against the Pacific, it incorporates both the town of Salinas and the coastal town of Monterey, 17 miles to the west. A quiet, slightly dull town, Salinas is the birthplace of Steinbeck and now houses, at No 1, Main Street, the National Steinbeck Centre. A large, light-filled building, this centre chronicles the writer's life and work in spectacular detail. Themed galleries stage scenes from the books and movies. Rocinante, the camper Steinbeck drove around America researching Travels with Charlie, is a prize exhibit. There is a biographical film of the writer. The atmosphere is that of small-town America in the middle decades of the 20th century.
A couple of blocks away from Main Street, John Steinbeck was born on Central Avenue in 1902. He did not have a happy childhood. His relationship with his mother, the daughter of Ulster Presbyterians from Ballykelly, Co Antrim, was difficult. And there was no help from his depressive father, John Ernst Steinbeck. To get away from them Steinbeck took to the streets of Salinas and Monterey and haunted the coastline between both towns, developing an affinity with the natural world. He also spent as much time as he could in King County where his grandfather, Samuel Hamilton, had a large farm. Samuel was a great outdoors' man and had a genius for working with his hands which he passed on to his grandson. This life is well reflected in East of Eden.
Steinbeck's greatest novel, The Grapes of Wrath, also has its genesis in Salinas. Coming off Route 66, which links Oklahoma to California's central valley, many "dust-bowl refugees" in the late 1920s and 1930s landed in the small town. The little streets were lined with old jalopies stacked with furniture and ragged people. Steinbeck was determined to write about this human quest for self-realisation but the book got him into trouble and, to many, he remained a "dirty communist" for the rest of his life. He was in trouble, too, when he published Cannery Row and introduced us to the seedy, but all too human, undertow of Monterey life. A New Deal democrat, Steinbeck did not suffer the slings and arrows well. With one broken marriage behind him and a second one in big trouble, he moved permanently to New York and took up the life of "the celebrity".
It didn't suit him. The success of his books and the equal success of the movies, however, brought him pleasure. And his happy third marriage to Elaine Scott instilled in him a modicum of self-confidence. This he needed because when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962 the American critics were especially mean-minded. They did not regard his work as worthy of the great prize.
In 1960, John Steinbeck set out to rediscover Americain a camper van with his poodle, Charlie. He was wary of returning to the Salinas Valley where most of his old friends were, by now, dead. Unhappily, Steinbeck discovered the truth of Thomas Wolfe's adage that "you can't go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory". So he went back to Elaine and wrote Travels with Charlie, the success of which changed the common road narrative into a literary genre.
In later years he came to Ireland to search out his Hamilton ancestors and to attend the Abbey Theatre. In 1966, he died in New York and his ashes were placed in the Garden of Memories in Salinas.