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 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