The House on Central Avenue

On Central Avenue in Salinas there is a two-story Victorian house built in eighteen ninety-seven, Queen Anne style, with a wide porch and the slightly formal bearing of a late-nineteenth-century California merchant's home. A man named J.J. Conner built it. A few years after its construction, a local schoolteacher named Olive Hamilton and her husband John Ernst Steinbeck bought it, moved in, and began raising a family there. On the twenty-seventh of February, nineteen oh two, in what is now the front reception room, their son John was born. He would live in that house until he left for Stanford University at seventeen.

The house at one thirty-two Central Avenue is now a restaurant, run by volunteers from the local Valley Guild since nineteen seventy-four, serving lunch Tuesday through Saturday. The rooms where Steinbeck grew up have tablecloths and china on the tables. The gift shop in the basement is called The Best Cellar. It is the sort of gentle, affectionate preservation that happens when a community genuinely loves someone, which in this case sits in some tension with the actual history of how Salinas felt about its most famous son while he was alive.

Steinbeck left Salinas and never really came back. He lived variously in Pacific Grove, New York, Sag Harbor. He described himself early as rebelling against what he called Salinas thinking, which he associated with a kind of smug, self-satisfied Republican respectability. His politics ran in the opposite direction. He became a committed New Deal Democrat, a supporter of Franklin Roosevelt, a writer who took the side of the Dust Bowl migrants and the packing-shed strikers and the landless poor. Salinas returned the favor with decades of resentment.

When The Grapes of Wrath was published in nineteen thirty-nine, it won Steinbeck the Pulitzer Prize and the enduring fury of the valley's agricultural establishment. The book was banned in Kern County, south of here, where authorities called it obscene and dishonest. East of Eden, published in nineteen fifty-two and set almost entirely in this valley, was burned in Salinas on at least two occasions. Steinbeck was one of the ten most-challenged authors in American libraries between nineteen ninety and two thousand four, according to the American Library Association. Of Mice and Men, which is set in the bunkhouses and barley fields of the Salinas Valley, ranked fifth on the list of one hundred most banned books.

The Valley Guild volunteers who serve lunch in his childhood home are proud of him. The town now markets itself, extensively, around his name. The house is a California Historical Landmark and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. History has a way of reconciling what life could not.