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 Award Grapes of Wrath" and captures the writer's enduring legacy as an engaged and socially aware artist. From the 1930s on Steinbeck wrote about "the people," his heart open to the longing, loneliness, despair and triumph of those on the edges. Americans were his people, and his last book, "America and Americans" (1966) expresses his enduring love for a democratic nation. Thomas Steinbeck wrote that the awardee is a "planetary patriot," which means, a person who, in keeping with Maurice Steinbeck's understanding of the highest aspirations of an artist, "stands up against the stones of condemnation, and speaks for those who