He didn't know it at the time, but John Steinbeck started getting ready to write The Grapes of Wrath when he was a small boy in California. Much of what he saw and heard while growing up found its way into the novel. On weekends his father took John and his three sisters on long drives out into the broad and beautiful valleys south of Salinas, the town where John was born in 1902. John passed vast orchards, and endless fields green with lettuce and barley. He observed the workers and the run-down shacks in which they lived. And he saw, even before he was old enough to wear long pants, that the farmhands' l