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 notes, "[T]his honor was one of the few in the world that one could not buy nor gain by political maneuver. It was precisely because the committee made its judgment ... on its own criteria, rather than plugging into 'the main currents of American writing' as defined by the critical establishment, that the award had value." In his acceptance speech later in the year in Stockholm, he said: In 2012, (50 years later), the Nobel Prize opened its archives and it was revealed that Steinbeck was a "compromise choice" among a shortlist consisting of Steinbeck, British authors Robert Graves and