Novelist, short story writer, journalist and Nobel Prize winner, John Steinbeck chronicled the struggles and aspirations of ordinary people with compassion and an abiding commitment to social justice. His subjects were migrant workers and striking fruit pickers, bus drivers, peasants, farmers, scientists and prostitutes, the homeless and dispossessed. Yet, although his 1939 masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath (1939) , would redefine the nation's moral and political compass as few works of fiction have, Steinbeck's novels are more than sociological studies or political tracts. Deeply ecological, his narratives seamlessly connect the social and biological landscapes of what has come to be called “Steinbeck Country,” the hills, valleys, mountains, rivers, and coastlines of Central California. “Man,” Steinbeck writes in The Log from the Sea of Cortez , “is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable” (217). Born in Salinas, California, in 1902, the…