John Steinbeck House (Salinas, California) 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 located two blocks away
John Steinbeck who would go on to write a classic early textbook on ecology. Ricketts became a proponent of ecological thinking, in which man was only one part of a great chain of being, caught in a web of life too large for him to control or understand. Meanwhile, Ricketts operated a biological lab on the coast of Monterey, selling biological samples of small animals, fish, rays, starfish, turtles, and other marine forms to schools and colleges. Between 1930 and 1936, Steinbeck and Ricketts became close friends. Steinbeck's wife began working at the lab as secretary-bookkeeper. Steinbeck helped on an informal basis.