John Steinbeck's Fiction and California:

From his native California in the image of ethnic America, John Steinbeck has created a fictional world representing Mexican Americans, Chinese Americans, African Americans, Paisanos, and Okies (White Americans from Oklahoma) placed in a minor position because of their ethnic differences. In the California fiction, portraits that they display, places where they live, languages that they speak, and relations which they web illustrate these people’s marginalization. By undertaking “the archaeology of knowledge” on the perception of human minorities in California, the novelist John Steinbeck’s compassion and global vision render them visible and reveal their multifarious humanness which completes the America’s plurality of people and cultures. Such an orientation of John Steinbeck’s writing helps classify him among white American novelists dealing with ethnicity so as to build a fair world.