John Steinbeck asocial individuals who, in their wild revels, are almost caricatures of King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table. It has been said that in the United States this book came as a welcome antidote to the gloom of the then prevailing depression." "Tortilla Flat" was adapted as a 1942 film of the same name, starring Spencer Tracy, Hedy Lamarr and John Garfield, a friend of Steinbeck. With some of the proceeds, he built a summer ranch-home in Los Gatos. Steinbeck began to write a series of "California novels" and Dust Bowl fiction, set among common people during the Great Depression.
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