John Steinbeck House (Monte Sereno, California) John Steinbeck House (Monte Sereno, California) The John Steinbeck House at 16250 Greenwood Lane in Monte Sereno, California, was the home of author John Steinbeck from 1936 to 1938. The house was built in 1936, in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains in what was then part of the town of Los Gatos, California, for Steinbeck and his wife, Carol. While living in the house, Steinbeck wrote "The Grapes of Wrath" and completed "Of Mice and Men". The Steinbecks added a guest house to the property after the house's completion; renowned actors, literary agents, and friends of the Steinbecks
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"