John Steinbeck Trivia
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59 free John Steinbeck trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 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it moves through the life: the sugar-beet farms, the mannequin business, the fish-and-crab diet of the Depression, the unpublished werewolf mystery, the Hooverville reporting that became his masterpiece, and the handgun he bought when the book made him enemies at home.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.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which California town was John Steinbeck born in 1902?
Salinas
Salinas: he was born in a bedroom of the family's Victorian house on Central Avenue, which volunteers later turned into a lunch restaurant two blocks from the National Steinbeck Center.
Q 02Steinbeck's German grandfather helped run Mount Hope, an 1850s Christian farm meant to teach Jews agriculture, in which region?
Palestine
Palestine, then under Ottoman rule: the farm outside Jaffa was abandoned after an 1858 raid in which his grandfather's brother was shot dead, and the family left for America.
Q 03Steinbeck took the title Of Mice and Men from a poem by which writer?
Robert Burns
Robert Burns's 'To a Mouse' warns that the best-laid schemes of mice and men often go wrong; Steinbeck swapped the line in for his working title, 'Something That Happened'.
Q 04Which university did Steinbeck drift in and out of for six years without graduating?
Stanford
Stanford: he signed up only for the courses that interested him, mostly literature and writing, and kept dropping out to work on ranches before leaving for good.
Q 05After winters alone as an estate caretaker, Steinbeck met his first wife Carol at a fish hatchery where?
Lake Tahoe
Lake Tahoe: he finished his first novel while isolated there through long winters, then took a summer job at the Tahoe City hatchery, where Carol walked in as a tourist.
Q 06Which highway did Steinbeck christen 'the mother road' as the Joads drove it west in The Grapes of Wrath?
Route 66
Route 66 carried Dust Bowl families west to California, and Steinbeck's phrase for it in the novel stuck: the highway has been known as the Mother Road ever since.
Q 07Which rock star named his 1995 album The Ghost of Tom Joad after the hero of The Grapes of Wrath?
Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Springsteen set the title song in the 1990s, likening its homeless and jobless to Steinbeck's Dust Bowl migrants; the hushed acoustic album won a Grammy for best contemporary folk album.
Q 08Which marine biologist became Steinbeck's mentor from 1930 and the model for 'Doc' in Cannery Row?
Ed Ricketts
Ed Ricketts ran Pacific Biological Laboratories, selling preserved sea creatures to schools, and his tide-pool habit of seeing life as one connected whole runs through Steinbeck's fiction.
Q 09What was Steinbeck's first novel, published in 1929, about the privateer Henry Morgan?
Cup of Gold
Cup of Gold reached shops in August 1929, two months before the Wall Street crash, and found few readers; his next two books fared no better.
Q 10Steinbeck took the title The Moon Is Down from a line in which Shakespeare play?
Macbeth
Macbeth: Banquo's son says 'The moon is down' shortly before Macbeth goes to murder King Duncan, and Steinbeck borrowed the words for his novel of a town under enemy occupation.
Q 11Which 1935 novel about wine-loving friends on the California coast gave Steinbeck his first popular success?
Tortilla Flat
Tortilla Flat won the Commonwealth Club of California's gold medal for the best novel by a Californian and, after three books that barely sold, finally brought him readers and money.
Q 12Steinbeck wrote the novella Of Mice and Men as an experiment that could double as what?
A stage play
A stage play: he shaped the book in three acts so it could be performed from its own lines, and it opened on Broadway the same year, winning the Drama Critics' Circle Award for best play.
Q 13Which actor played Lennie in the 1939 film of Of Mice and Men?
Lon Chaney Jr.
Q 21Steinbeck never names the occupied northern country in The Moon Is Down, but which nation gave him a Freedom Cross for it?
Norway
Norway took the occupied town for its own: banned copies passed from hand to hand under the Nazis, though being caught with one could mean prison or death.
Q 22Which Hollywood star founded the Navy's 'Beach Jumpers', the deception unit Steinbeck sailed with in 1943?
Douglas Fairbanks Jr.
Douglas Fairbanks Jr. had talked the Navy into forming the unit; Steinbeck went along as a reporter and wrote up how a small landing party bluffed the German garrison on Ventotene into surrender.
Q 23Steinbeck asked to have his name removed from which 1944 Hitchcock film he had written?
Lifeboat
Lon Chaney Jr. had played Lennie on stage in Los Angeles, and that won him the part in the first Steinbeck book to be filmed; it was his first major screen role.
Q 14Who played Lennie opposite Gary Sinise's George in the 1992 film of Of Mice and Men?
John Malkovich
John Malkovich and Gary Sinise had first played Lennie and George on stage at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre in 1980; Sinise, who also directed the film, got the rights from Steinbeck's widow.
Q 15Whose photographs of migrant families illustrated Their Blood Is Strong, Steinbeck's 1938 pamphlet on California's farm camps?
Dorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange's picture filled the cover; the pamphlet reprinted Steinbeck's newspaper reports from the migrant camps, the research that grew into The Grapes of Wrath.
Q 16The Grapes of Wrath, the top-selling novel of 1939, won which award for fiction the following year?
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize came in 1940 even as opponents denounced the novel as communist propaganda and some places banned and burned it.
Q 17Who played Tom Joad in the 1940 film of The Grapes of Wrath?
Henry Fonda
Henry Fonda wanted the part so badly that he signed the seven-year contract with Fox that studio boss Darryl Zanuck demanded in return; it brought his first Oscar nomination.
Q 18Which California county banned The Grapes of Wrath from its schools and libraries from 1939 to 1941?
Kern
Kern County is where the Joads end up; a big growers' group pushed the ban through and staged a photo of a farm worker burning the book, which he had not read.
Q 19Which First Lady toured California's migrant camps and backed The Grapes of Wrath as no exaggeration?
Eleanor Roosevelt
Eleanor Roosevelt had already praised the novel in her newspaper column; after seeing the camps herself she told a reporter, 'I have never believed that The Grapes of Wrath was exaggerated.'
Q 20Sea of Cortez (1941), Steinbeck's book with his biologist friend, describes a collecting trip to which body of water?
The Gulf of California
The Gulf of California is the Sea of Cortez by another name; the book reached shops the week of Pearl Harbor and sank, and in 1951 Steinbeck reissued its narrative half alone.
Lifeboat, he complained, mocked organised labour and turned the 'Negro of dignity' in his story into a comic figure; Fox kept his name on it anyway, and the story earned him an Oscar nomination.
Q 24Steinbeck's 1945 novel Cannery Row is set among the sardine canneries of which California city?
Monterey
Monterey renamed Ocean View Avenue as Cannery Row in 1958 in the novel's honour, and one of its defunct sardine canneries became the Monterey Bay Aquarium in 1984.
Q 25On his 1940 Sea of Cortez voyage, Steinbeck heard the folk tale behind The Pearl in which Mexican port?
La Paz
La Paz was once rich in pearls; Steinbeck retold the local tale in his log of the trip and, five years later, reworked it as a magazine story, 'The Pearl of the World'.
Q 26Steinbeck's screenplay Viva Zapata!, directed by Elia Kazan, starred which actor as Emiliano Zapata?
Marlon Brando
Marlon Brando was nominated for Best Actor and Steinbeck for his script, but the film's only Oscar went to Anthony Quinn, who played Zapata's brother.
Q 27Which photographer accompanied Steinbeck to the Soviet Union in 1947 for the book A Russian Journal?
Robert Capa
Robert Capa's photographs fill A Russian Journal, in which the two men set out to do 'honest reporting' on how ordinary Soviet people lived, 'without editorial comment'.
Q 28How did Steinbeck's friend and mentor, the biologist behind 'Doc', die in May 1948?
A train struck his car
A train struck his car at a railway crossing; Steinbeck rushed west but arrived hours after his friend died, and later wrote a long tribute essay to him.
Q 29Drafting East of Eden, Steinbeck began each working day with a letter to whom?
His editor
His editor, Pascal Covici, never got them in the post: Steinbeck wrote each letter on a left-hand page of his notebook, then the day's stretch of the novel on the page facing it.
Q 30Which family in East of Eden is based on Steinbeck's own maternal ancestry?
The Hamiltons
The Hamiltons carry his mother's maiden name: his real grandfather Samuel Hamilton is a main character, and a young John Steinbeck turns up in the story himself.