George and Lennie, Steinbeck's enduring characters in "Of Mice and Men," left their footprints in the fields and waterways of Monterey County.

The Of Mice and Men installation at the Steinbeck exhibit of the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, Calif. on Tuesday, April 1, 2014. (LiPo Ching/Bay Area News Group) By Stephen Cooper ...

Each year, Salinas receives 30,000 annual visitors, and the National Steinbeck Center’s Steinbeck Festival, held each May, will be bigger than ever in 2014, as it honors the 75th anniversary of ...

The fertile Salinas Valley served as a backdrop for some of John Steinbeck’s most memorable writing, from “East of Eden” to “Of Mice and Men.” Today, voters will write a new story there ...

Salinas Valley also is home to a number of vineyards and wineries, most with tasting rooms. A little-known fact is that a substantial amount of wine grapes grown in the valley are shipped to Napa ...

John Steinbeck may have written “Of Mice and Men” as a novella, but he always had theatrical aspirations for it. After the book launched his literary celebrity in 1937, he turned it into a ...

The author of “Grapes of Wrath” and “Of Mice and Men” won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962. He set many stories, such as “East of Eden” and “Tortilla Flat,” in the Salinas ...

When he finished his first major novel — “In Dubious Battle” — John Steinbeck’s editors crossed their fingers for another epic. What the novelist delivered instead was a thin novella ...

Thanks to John Steinbeck's works, like "The Grapes of Wrath" and "Of Mice and Men," many Americans have been familiar with Monterey County's agricultural legacy since the 1930s. The Salinas Valley ...

There's the John Steinbeck most Californians know, the bard of the Salinas Valley and Cannery Row, the chronicler of the common man's plight, the acclaimed author of such towering works as "The ...