John Steinbeck, born in Salinas, California, in 1902, grew up in a fertile agricultural valley, about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929). After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two California books, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later collected in The Long Valley (1938). Popular success and financial security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935), stories about Monterey's paisanos. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the California laboring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the book considered by many his finest, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. East of Eden (1952) was an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family's history. Later books include Once There Was a War (1958), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), and America and Americans (1966). Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, and, in 1964, he was presented with the United States Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Steinbeck died in New York in 1968.

Gabriel Bernal Granados is one of Mexico's foremost writers. His many books of essays, short stories, and aphorisms, include Ramparts (2015), and most recently Notes Toward a Theory of Failure (2016). Bernal Granados is the translator of many US modernist and contemporary writers into Spanish, including Guy Davenport, Paul Metcalf, Lydia Davis, Barbara Guest, Ronald Johnson, and William Bronk, among many others. He is the recipient of awards from Mexico's National Fund for Culture and the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Mexican Center for Writers.