John Steinbeck Salinas, Monterey and parts of the San Joaquin Valley were the setting for many of his stories. The area is now sometimes referred to as "Steinbeck Country". Most of his early work dealt with subjects familiar to him from his formative years. An exception was his first novel, "", which concerns the pirate Henry Morgan, whose adventures had captured Steinbeck's imagination as a child. In his subsequent novels, Steinbeck found a more authentic voice by drawing upon direct memories of his life in California. His childhood friend, Max Wagner, a brother of Jack Wagner and who later became a film
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