John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. (February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) was an American writer. He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and East of Eden (1952) and the novella Of Mice and Men (1937). He was an author of twenty-seven books, including sixteen novels, six non-fiction books and five collections of short stories; Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.

John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California. He was of German and Irish descent. Johann Adolf Großsteinbeck, Steinbeck's paternal grandfather, had shortened the family name to Steinbeck when he immigrated to the United States. The family farm in Heiligenhaus, Mettmann, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, is still today named "Großsteinbeck."

His father, John Ernst Steinbeck, served as Monterey County treasurer. John's mother, Olive Hamilton, a former school teacher, shared Steinbeck's passion of reading and writing. The Steinbecks were members of the Episcopal Church. Steinbeck lived in a small rural town that was essentially a frontier settlement, set amid some of the world's most fertile land. He spent his summers working on nearby ranches and later with migrant workers on Spreckels ranch. He became aware of the harsher aspects of migrant life and the darker side of human nature, which supplied him with material expressed in such works as Of Mice and Men. He also explored his surroundings, walking across local forests, fields, and farms.

Oliver Burgess Meredith (November 16, 1907 – September 9, 1997), known professionally as Burgess Meredith, was an American actor in theatre, film, and television, who also worked as a director. Active for more than six decades, Meredith has been called "a virtuosic actor" who was "one of the most accomplished actors of the century." Meredith won several Emmys, was the first man to win two times the Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actor, and was nominated for Academy Awards.

Meredith was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of Ida Beth (née Burgess) and Canadian-born William George Meredith, M.D.

He graduated from Hoosac School in 1926 and then attended Amherst College as a member of the Class of 1931. Meredith served in the United States Army Air Forces in World War II, reaching the rank of captain. He was discharged in 1944 to work on the movie The Story of G.I. Joe, in which he starred as the popular war correspondent Ernie Pyle.

In 1933, he became a member of Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theatre company in New York City. Although best known to the larger world audience for his film and television work, Meredith was an influential actor and director for the stage. He made his Broadway debut as Peter in Le Gallienne's production of Romeo and Juliet (1930) and became a star in Maxwell Anderson's Winterset (1935), which became his film debut the following year. His early life and theatre work were the subject of a New Yorker profile.

Frank Muller (May 5, 1951 – June 4, 2008) was a stage and television actor, but was most famous as an audiobook narrator.

Muller was born in The Netherlands, the eldest of five children. His family emigrated to the United States when he was five.

Muller was a classically trained actor who began his career working on stage and doing commercials. He spent many years on the New York stage, where he became a company member of the Riverside Shakespeare Company, for which he played the title role in King Henry V, Edmund the Bastard in The History of King Lear, and the title role in Cyrano de Bergerac, as well as performing with the Roundabout Theater Company and the New York Shakespeare Festival among others. He also played supporting roles on television in shows like Law And Order, Life Goes On, Harry and the Hendersons, and All My Children.

It is as an audiobook narrator, however, that he was most famous. In 1979, Henry Trentman founded Recorded Books and hired Muller as a narrator. The company began by publishing audiobook recordings of public domain works such as Call of the Wild and A Tale of Two Cities but later expanded into copyrighted works as audiobooks began to grow in popularity. Muller soon became the narrator of choice for such authors as Stephen King, John le Carré, John Grisham, Elmore Leonard and many others. Muller won the 2003 Audie Award for Best Male Narrator for his reading of Elmore Leonard's Tishomingo Blues.

Thomas Myles Steinbeck(born August 2, 1944) is a writer and the eldest son of Nobel Laureate John Steinbeck. Steinbeck, who has written numerous screenplays, published his first book of short stories, Down to a Soundless Sea, in 2002. His first novel, In the Shadow of the Cypress, was published in 2010.

Thomas ("Thom") Steinbeck was born in Manhattan, New York, to John and Gwyndolyn Steinbeck. His younger brother was John Steinbeck IV. He had a good relationship with his famous father, stating that he would rate him, "an eight-and-a-half or a nine" on a ten-point scale.

Steinbeck went to Vietnam in the 1960s, serving as a helicopter door gunner. After his service there, he returned in the late 1960s as a combat photographer.

Along with his writing and producing obligations, Steinbeck lectures on American literature, creative writing, and the communication arts. He serves as a board member of the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California and the Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University. Once a year he presents the John Steinbeck Award through his foundation, The John Steinbeck Family Foundation in affiliation with The Center for Steinbeck Studies.