National Steinbeck Center National Steinbeck Center The National Steinbeck Center is a museum and memorial dedicated to the author John Steinbeck that is located at One Main Street in Salinas, California, the town where Steinbeck grew up. The Steinbeck Center Foundation was founded in 1983; the center itself was finished and opened to the public on June 27, 1998. The center houses the largest collection of Steinbeck archives in the United States, with various exhibits on his body of work and philosophy. The Center recently renovated a small exhibit for rotating exhibits within the main exhibit hall. The Steinbeck Center is a focal
John Steinbeck realist fully equal to his predecessors Sinclair Lewis and Ernest Hemingway." Although modest about his own talent as a writer, Steinbeck talked openly of his own admiration of certain writers. In 1953, he wrote that he considered cartoonist Al Capp, creator of the satirical "Li'l Abner", "possibly the best writer in the world today." At his own first Nobel Prize press conference he was asked his favorite authors and works and replied: "Hemingway's short stories and nearly everything Faulkner wrote." In September 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded Steinbeck Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1967, at the behest of "Newsday"