John Steinbeck, author, onetime LI resident, gets Google Doodle honors

The team at Google has dedicated the “Doodle” on its homepage Thursday to the late Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Steinbeck, who was born 112 years ago today.

Many people know Steinbeck for his novels, including “Of Mice and Men,” “East of Eden,” and “The Grapes of Wrath.” The latter earned him his Pulitzer in 1940. But you may not know that Steinbeck, a California native, also called Long Island home and was a correspondent for Newsday.

Steinbeck lived in a little house in Sag Harbor overlooking Noyac Bay from the mid-1950s until a year before his death in 1968. The home was the starting point of the cross-country road trip he took with his poodle that inspired his book, “Travels with Charley.”

Steinbeck wrote occasional pieces for Newsday starting in 1956 at the invitation of the paper’s founder, Alicia Patterson. He also served as a Vietnam War correspondent for the paper. His articles, under “Letters to Alicia,” ran from late 1966 to mid-1967.