John Steinbeck allowing Steinbeck to spend a full day on the set of "The Grapes of Wrath" and the next day on the set of "Of Mice and Men." In the 1930s and 1940s, Ed Ricketts strongly influenced Steinbeck's writing. Steinbeck frequently took small trips with Ricketts along the California coast to give himself time off from his writing and to collect biological specimens, which Ricketts sold for a living. Their joint book about a collecting expedition to the Gulf of California in 1940, which was part travelogue and part natural history, published just as the U.S. entered World War II, never
John Steinbeck wrote in "The New York Times": "John Steinbeck's first great book was his last great book. But Good Lord, what a book that was and is: "The Grapes of Wrath"." Poore noted a "preachiness" in Steinbeck's work, "as if half his literary inheritance came from the best of Mark Twain— and the other half from the worst of Cotton Mather." But he asserted that "Steinbeck didn't need the Nobel Prize— the Nobel judges needed him." Steinbeck's incomplete novel based on the King Arthur legends of Malory and others, "The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights", was published in