The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights

John Steinbeck was the third of four children and the only son born to John Ernst and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck. He graduated from Salinas High School in 1919 and then attended classes at Stanford University, leaving in 1925 without a degree. He was variously employed as a sales clerk, farm laborer, ranch hand, and factory worker. In 1925 he traveled by freight from Los Angeles to New York where he was a construction worker. During the 1930s he produced most of his famous novels (To a God Unknown, Tortilla Flat, In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men, his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Grapes of Wrath, and The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights).

In 1941 he moved with the singer who would become his second wife to New York City. They had two sons, Thom (1944) and John IV (1946). 1948 saw the death of his close friend Ed Ricketts, divorce, a tour of Russia, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His screenplay Viva Zapata! was released as a film in 1952. Seventeen of his works have been made into movies. He received three Academy Award Nominations. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. President Johnson awarded him the United States Medal of Freedom in 1964. He died in 1968. He was commemorated on a U.S. postage stamp on what would have been his seventy-fifth birthday. His ashes lie in Garden of Memories Cemetery in Salinas.

Published posthumously in 1976, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, a retelling of portions of Malory's Morte Darthure, is Steinbeck's attempt to recreate for a modern audeince the magic he had felt when reading Malory as a child. It was left unfinished when he died in 1968.