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60 free John Steinbeck trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This John Steinbeck trivia quiz covers the Salinas Valley writer behind The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, East of Eden and Cannery Row. The easy questions cover the books, the Nobel Prize, the California town he was born in, the poodle he drove across America and the marine biologist who became 'Doc'. From there it moves through the life: the sugar-beet farms, the mannequin business, the fish-and-crab diet of the Depression, the unpublished werewolf mystery, the Hooverville reporting that became his masterpiece, and the handgun he bought when the book made him enemies at home. The harder end covers the Beach Jumpers raids with Douglas Fairbanks Jr., the Hitchcock film he asked to have his name removed from, the trip to the USSR with Robert Capa, the Somerset cottage where he chased King Arthur, the CIA offer, the yearly IRS audits, the 2012 revelation that he was a Nobel 'compromise choice', and what he said when asked whether he deserved the prize. Every answer was checked against Steinbeck's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our classic literature and banned books quizzes are the natural next stop.
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Q 01In which California town was John Steinbeck born in 1902?
Salinas
His turreted Victorian boyhood home now serves fixed-menu lunches, and the National Steinbeck Center is two blocks away.
Q 02Steinbeck's paternal grandfather helped found Mount Hope, a short-lived farming colony in which region?
Palestine
It broke up after Arab attackers killed his brother; Steinbeck visited the site in Tel Aviv in 1966.
Q 03Harvesting which crop with migrant workers gave Steinbeck material for Of Mice and Men?
Sugar beets
At the Spreckels Sugar Company he sometimes worked in the laboratory, which gave him time to write.
Q 04Which university did Steinbeck attend, leaving without a degree in 1925?
Stanford
He studied English literature there, then tried and failed to make it as a writer in New York.
Q 05Steinbeck met his first wife Carol Henning while working as a tour guide and caretaker where?
Lake Tahoe
They married in 1930 in Los Angeles, where he briefly tried a doomed manufacturing venture with friends.
Q 06What did Steinbeck and his friends try to manufacture in Los Angeles in 1930 to make money?
Plaster mannequins
The money ran out in six months and the couple retreated to his father's cottage in Pacific Grove.
Q 07During the Depression, Steinbeck claimed to live on garden vegetables and what he gathered from the sea, namely what?
Fish and crabs
When that failed the couple accepted welfare and occasionally stole bacon from the local market.
Q 08Which marine biologist became Steinbeck's mentor from 1930 and the model for 'Doc' in Cannery Row?
Ed Ricketts
Ricketts sold biological specimens from a lab on the coast and sometimes played music to calm Steinbeck down.
Q 09What was Steinbeck's first novel, published in 1929, about the privateer Henry Morgan?
Cup of Gold
Morgan's adventures had captured his imagination as a child; the book centres on the sack of Panamá Viejo.
Q 10Steinbeck's never-published 1930 novel Murder at Full Moon features what kind of killer?
A werewolf
He considered it unworthy of publication and it has stayed in the vault ever since.
Q 11Which 1935 novel about young paisanos on the California coast gave Steinbeck his first critical success?
Tortilla Flat
The 1942 film starred Spencer Tracy and Hedy Lamarr; the proceeds built him a summer home in Los Gatos.
Q 12Steinbeck wrote Of Mice and Men with what format in mind, after watching troupes perform for workers in Mexico?
A stage play
He refused to see the New York production, telling George S. Kaufman the play in his head was already 'perfect'.
Q 13Which actor played Lennie in the 1939 film of Of Mice and Men, having played him on stage?
Lon Chaney Jr.
Burgess Meredith played George and became one of Steinbeck's close friends for the next two decades.
Q 21Sea of Cortez (1941), Steinbeck's book with his biologist friend, describes a collecting trip to which body of water?
The Gulf of California
It sold badly, published just as the US entered the war; Steinbeck reissued the narrative half in 1951 under his name alone.
Q 22Which country awarded Steinbeck the King Haakon VII Freedom Cross for his occupation novel The Moon Is Down?
Norway
The novel never names the country, but everyone assumed it was Norway and the occupiers were German.
Q 23Which Hollywood star led the 'Beach Jumpers' commando raids Steinbeck joined in 1943?
Douglas Fairbanks Jr.
Q 14Who played Lennie opposite Gary Sinise's George in the 1992 film of Of Mice and Men?
John Malkovich
Randy Quaid had played Lennie in a 1981 TV version with Robert Blake as George.
Q 15Which newspaper sent Steinbeck to the San Joaquin Valley Hoovervilles in 1936, research that fed The Grapes of Wrath?
The San Francisco News
His article series for the paper was called The Harvest Gypsies.
Q 16How many copies of The Grapes of Wrath were in print by February 1940, under a year after release?
430,000
It was the best-selling book of 1939 and won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
Q 17Who played Tom Joad in John Ford's 1940 film of The Grapes of Wrath?
Henry Fonda
Fonda was nominated for the Best Actor Academy Award; Jane Darwell played Ma Joad.
Q 18What did Steinbeck buy for his safety after The Grapes of Wrath brought him threats?
A handgun
He wrote that landowners were spreading a rumour that the Okies wanted to kill him for lying about them.
Q 19Which California county banned The Grapes of Wrath from its schools and libraries from 1939 to 1941?
Kern
The book was also burned in his hometown on two occasions, and a Mississippi school board banned it in 2003 for profanity.
Q 20Which First Lady defended The Grapes of Wrath in her 'My Day' column, saying it was not exaggerated?
Eleanor Roosevelt
She was already a fan of Of Mice and Men.
On one raid off Italy he used a Thompson submachine gun to help capture Italian and German prisoners.
Q 24Steinbeck asked to have his name removed from which 1944 Hitchcock film he had written?
Lifeboat
He believed the finished film had racist undertones.
Q 25Steinbeck's 1944 novel Cannery Row was a 'love letter' to which city?
Monterey
Ocean View Avenue was renamed Cannery Row in 1958; the Hovden Sardine Cannery site next to Doc's lab became the Monterey Bay Aquarium in 1984.
Q 26Steinbeck first heard the folk tale that became The Pearl in which Mexican city, in 1940?
La Paz
He described it in The Log from the Sea of Cortez as 'so much like a parable that it almost can't be'.
Q 27Steinbeck's screenplay Viva Zapata!, directed by Elia Kazan, starred which actor as Emiliano Zapata?
Marlon Brando
Anthony Quinn co-starred; Steinbeck was inspired to write it while in Cuernavaca for the filming of The Pearl.
Q 28Which photographer accompanied Steinbeck to the Soviet Union in 1947 for the book A Russian Journal?
Robert Capa
They visited Moscow, Kyiv, Tbilisi, Batumi and Stalingrad; the KGB suspected Steinbeck of being an American agent.
Q 29How did Steinbeck's friend and mentor, the biologist behind 'Doc', die in May 1948?
A train struck his car
Steinbeck rushed back to California but arrived hours too late, then sank into a year of depression.
Q 30Over how many days in 1952 did Steinbeck write the first draft of East of Eden?
276
He wrote a letter to his editor every day while working, later published as Journal of a Novel.