Thomas Steinbeck writing, and the communication arts. He served as a board member of both the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California and "The Center for Steinbeck Studies" at San Jose State University. And once every year, he would personally present the John Steinbeck Award through his foundation, "The John Steinbeck Family Foundation" in affiliation with "The Center for Steinbeck Studies". During his lifetime, Steinbeck was an advocate for authors' rights. In 2009, he and his friend, folk-singer Arlo Guthrie (another son of a famous father), brought a copyright infringement lawsuit against Google which was eventually settled. At the time of his
John Steinbeck wrote in "The New York Times": "John Steinbeck's first great book was his last great book. But Good Lord, what a book that was and is: "The Grapes of Wrath"." Poore noted a "preachiness" in Steinbeck's work, "as if half his literary inheritance came from the best of Mark Twain— and the other half from the worst of Cotton Mather." But he asserted that "Steinbeck didn't need the Nobel Prize— the Nobel judges needed him." Steinbeck's incomplete novel based on the King Arthur legends of Malory and others, "The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights", was published in