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 IV John Steinbeck IV John Ernst Steinbeck IV (June 12, 1946 – February 7, 1991) was an American journalist and author. He was the second child of the Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck. In 1965, he was drafted into the United States Army and served in Vietnam. He worked as a journalist for Armed Forces Radio and TV, and as a war correspondent for the United States Department of Defense. In 1968, Steinbeck returned to Vietnam as a journalist. Along with Sean Flynn (the son of actor Errol Flynn), he started Dispatch News Service, which originally published Seymour Hersh's story on