John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, and East of Eden — novels that defined American literature’s social conscience. But the Nobel laureate also worked as an intelligence operative during World War II, maintained connections with intelligence agencies afterward, and led a private life far more reckless and contradictory than the humanitarian image his fiction projected.

This episode traces Steinbeck from his Salinas Valley childhood through the Dust Bowl novels that made him a literary giant, the wartime intelligence work, and the personal turbulence that shadowed a career built on compassion for the dispossessed.

• Steinbeck’s Salinas Valley origins and the migrant worker research behind The Grapes of Wrath
• The wartime intelligence operations and the connections that persisted after the war
• The personal turbulence — three marriages, alcoholism, and the gap between public image and private life
• The Nobel Prize, the Vietnam War support that divided his admirers, and his death in 1968