Google has honoured the quintessentially American author John Steinbeck with his very own Google Doodle on what would have been the writer's 112th birthday.

Best known for portraits of the Great Depression in novels such as Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel prize in literature. On Thursday, Google marked his work with a doodle in which the letters of the search engine's name fade into an animation showing the titles The Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row, Of Mice and Men, The Pearl and Travels with Charley, and quotes from the works.

There was no mention of Steinbeck's East of Eden, a novel first published in 1952 and considered by many to be his masterpiece, a work the author himself called "the big one".

Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California in 1902, and worked as a ranch hand, bricklayer and farm labourer before finding fame as a writer in 1935 with Tortilla Flat, a short comic novel. Of Mice and Men, the story of the farm-worker George Milton and his friend Lennie Small, was published two years later, with his Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath following in 1939. An exploration of greed based on a Mexican folk tale, The Pearl, was published in 1947, followed five years later by his recreation of the story of Genesis, East of Eden.

He was awarded the Nobel prize in literature in 1962, the year his travelogue Travels with Charley: In Search of America was published. The Swedish Academy hailed his "realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception".

Other American authors who have been celebrated by Google include Herman Melville and Mark Twain.

Quotes chosen by Google to illustrate Steinbeck's genius include: "In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage"; and "It is the hour of the pearl – the interval between day and night when time stops and examines itself."