Title: John Steinbeck
Content:  Steinbeck grew up in California's Salinas Valley, a culturally diverse place with a rich migratory and immigrant history. This upbringing imparted a regionalistic flavor to his writing, giving many of his works a distinct sense of place. Salinas, Monterey and parts of the San Joaquin Valley were the setting for many of his stories. The area is now sometimes referred to as "Steinbeck Country". Most of his early work dealt with subjects familiar to him from his formative years. An exception was his first novel, Cup of Gold, which concerns the pirate/privateer Henry Morgan, whose adventures had captured Steinbeck's imagination as a child. In his subsequent novels, Steinbeck found a more authentic voice by drawing upon direct memories of 
Title: John Steinbeck
Content:  later became agnostic. Steinbeck lived in a small rural valley (no more than a frontier settlement) set in some of the world's most fertile soil, about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast. Both valley and coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. He spent his summers working on nearby ranches and later with migrant workers on Spreckels sugar beet farms. There he learned of the harsher aspects of the migrant life and the darker side of human nature, which supplied him with material expressed in Of Mice and Men. He explored his surroundings, walking across local forests, fields, and farms. While working at Spreckels Sugar Company, he sometimes worked in 
Title: John Steinbeck
Content:  Steinbeck's contacts with leftist authors, journalists, and labor union figures may have influenced his writing. He joined the League of American Writers, a Communist organization, in 1935. Steinbeck was mentored by radical writers Lincoln Steffens and his wife Ella Winter. Through Francis Whitaker, a member of the Communist Party USA's John Reed Club for writers, Steinbeck met with strike organizers from the Cannery and Agricultural Workers' Industrial Union. In 1939, he signed a letter with some other writers in support of the Soviet invasion of Finland and the Soviet-established puppet government. Documents released by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2012 indicate that Steinbeck offered his services 
Title: John Steinbeck
Content:  life in California. His childhood friend, Max Wagner, a brother of Jack Wagner and who later became a film actor, served as inspiration for The Red Pony. Later he used actual American conditions and events in the first half of the 20th century, which he had experienced first-hand as a reporter. Steinbeck often populated his stories with struggling characters; his works examined the lives of the working class and migrant workers during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. His later work reflected his wide range of interests, including marine biology, politics, religion, history and mythology. One of his last published works was Travels with Charley, a travelogue of a road trip he took in 1960 to rediscover America.
Title: John Steinbeck
Content:  money ran out six months later due to a slow market, Steinbeck and Carol moved back to Pacific Grove, California, to a cottage owned by his father, on the Monterey Peninsula a few blocks outside the Monterey city limits. The elder Steinbecks gave John free housing, paper for his manuscripts, and from 1928, loans that allowed him to write without looking for work. During the Great Depression, Steinbeck bought a small boat, and later claimed that he was able to live on the fish and crabs that he gathered from the sea, and fresh vegetables from his garden and local farms. When those sources failed, Steinbeck and his wife accepted welfare, and on rare 
Title: American literature
Content:  Depression era literature was blunt and direct in its social criticism. John Steinbeck (1902–1968) was born in Salinas, California, where he set many of his stories. His style was simple and evocative, winning him the favor of the readers but not of the critics. Steinbeck often wrote about poor, working-class people and their struggle to lead a decent and honest life. The Grapes of Wrath (1939), considered his masterpiece, is a strong, socially-oriented novel that tells the story of the Joads, a poor family from Oklahoma and their journey to California in search of a better life. Other popular novels include Tortilla Flat, Of Mice and Men, Cannery Row, and East of Eden. He was awarded the Nobel 
Title: John Steinbeck
Content:  laboratory, which gave him time to write. He had considerable mechanical aptitude and fondness for repairing things he owned. Steinbeck graduated from Salinas High School in 1919 and went on to study English literature at Stanford University near Palo Alto, leaving without a degree in 1925. He traveled to New York City where he took odd jobs while trying to write. When he failed to publish his work, he returned to California and worked in 1928 as a tour guide and caretaker at Lake Tahoe, where he met Carol Henning, his first wife. They married in January 1930 in Los Angeles, where, with friends, he attempted to make money by manufacturing plaster mannequins. When 
Title: Cannery Row (novel)
Content:  in 1944 in an attempt to recover a Depression era world in Monterey which was, by then, already inaccessible to Steinbeck. Major influences for this change included the war's effect on both Steinbeck and Monterey, the breakup of Steinbeck's first marriage, and the insulation caused by Steinbeck's new wealth arising from his increasing fame and success as a writer. Steinbeck was already beginning to suspect that he would never again be able to go back to living in this, his favorite part of California. Indeed, after a failed attempt to live in California in the late 1940s, he left to spend the rest of his life in New York.
Title: John Steinbeck
Content:  Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California. He was of German, English, and Irish descent. Johann Adolf Großsteinbeck (1828–1913), Steinbeck's paternal grandfather, was a founder of Mount Hope, a short-lived messianic farming colony in Palestine that disbanded after Arab attackers killed his brother and raped his brother's wife and mother-in-law. He arrived in the United States in 1858, shortening the family name to Steinbeck. The family farm in Heiligenhaus, Mettmann, Germany, is still named "Großsteinbeck". His father, John Ernst Steinbeck (1862–1935), served as Monterey County treasurer. John's mother, Olive Hamilton (1867–1934), a former school teacher, shared Steinbeck's passion for reading and writing. The Steinbecks were members of the Episcopal Church, although 
Title: Travels with Charley
Content:  (a "salute" for a dog, as Steinbeck remarks), Steinbeck opines: "'If I thought he did it out of spite or to make a joke,' I said to myself, 'I'd kill him out of hand.'" (193) Steinbeck grew up in the Salinas Valley region of California in Monterey County and he describes his revisit to the area after a 20-year absence in detail. Remarking on the many changes, he notes the population growth and the progress the Monterey area had made. He then visited a bar from his youth where he met his old friend Johnny Garcia and learned that a lot of regulars and 

Question: what influenced john steinbeck to start writing?
Answer: William Faulkner.