John Steinbeck into the California Hall of Fame, located at the California Museum for History, Women and the Arts. His son, author Thomas Steinbeck, accepted the award on his behalf. To commemorate the 112th anniversary of Mr. Steinbeck's birthday on February 27, 2014, Google displayed an interactive doodle utilizing animation which included illustrations portraying scenes and quotes from several novels by the author. Steinbeck and his friend Ed Ricketts appear as a fictionalized characters in the 2016 novel, "Monterey Bay" about the founding of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, by Lindsay Hatton (Penguin Press). Steinbeck was affiliated to the St. Paul's Episcopal Church
John Steinbeck IV the tutelage of the politically powerful Coconut Monk, a silent tree-dwelling Buddhist yogi who adopted Steinbeck as a spiritual son. Amid the raging war, Steinbeck stayed in the monk's "peace zone", where the 400 monks who lived on the island hammered howitzer shell casings into bells. While in Saigon, Steinbeck participated in Michael Rubbo's 1970 documentary film "Sad Song of Yellow Skin", as part of a group of young American journalists practicing a New Journalism approach to covering the war. Steinbeck traveled back and forth between Asia and the United States several more times before settling in Boulder, Colorado, where