Steinbeck’s work insists on the dignity of the individual and the reality of choice.

His protagonists are often ordinary people: fruit pickers, ranch hands, drifters. The kind of lives he encountered growing up and working in California’s agricultural heartland.

He wrote from proximity rather than abstraction. His characters make mistakes; the world presses hard against them; yet the possibility of choosing differently remains. That belief runs through East of Eden in particular.

Steinbeck himself left Stanford without a degree. Success came slowly. Tenacity mattered as much as talent. Reading him reminds us of the people, lives, and choices we often overlook.

Over to you: which author(s) do you think really capture the lives, hopes, and dreams of ordinary people?

---

Reading makes us see what we’ve stopped noticing.