John Steinbeck House (Salinas, California) at 1 Main Street. John Steinbeck House (Salinas, California) John Steinbeck House is a historic house restaurant and house museum at 132 Central Avenue in Salinas, California. The house was the boyhood home to the author John Steinbeck. Steinbeck's boyhood home is a turreted Victorian building in downtown Salinas, which has been preserved and restored by the Valley Guild, a nonprofit organization.The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1989. Fixed menu lunches are served Monday through Saturday, and the house is open for tours during the summer on Sunday afternoons. The National Steinbeck Center is
John Steinbeck realist fully equal to his predecessors Sinclair Lewis and Ernest Hemingway." Although modest about his own talent as a writer, Steinbeck talked openly of his own admiration of certain writers. In 1953, he wrote that he considered cartoonist Al Capp, creator of the satirical "Li'l Abner", "possibly the best writer in the world today." At his own first Nobel Prize press conference he was asked his favorite authors and works and replied: "Hemingway's short stories and nearly everything Faulkner wrote." In September 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded Steinbeck Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1967, at the behest of "Newsday"