John Steinbeck House (Monte Sereno, California) stayed in the guest house while visiting the couple. In 1938, the Steinbecks left the house, as they felt that its location was no longer as secluded as it had been two years earlier. The John Steinbeck House was added to the National Register of Historic Places on December 28, 1989. Unlike Steinbeck's birthplace in Salinas, California, this house is now a private residence home and is closed to the public. 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.
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