John Ernst Steinbeck, (February 1902 – December 1968, ), was an American novelist, best known for The Grapes of Wrath (1939) which summed up the bitterness of the Great Depression decade and aroused widespread sympathy for the plight of migratory farmworkers. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1962. The Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ is considered Steinbeck’s masterpiece and part of the American literary canon. In the first 75 years after it was published, it sold 14 million copies.
– britannica.com