Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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When Steinbeck in 1962 became the sixth American author to win the No bel Prize,* he was well past the crest of his powers, even though the committee in Stockholm professed to admire especially The Winter of Our Discontent, published in 1961. The novel was a 311-page allegory, set on Long Island, an unaccustomed territory for Steinbeck, and was written to portray the contamination of the nation's mor al standards and beliefs...
...Steinbeck's 16 novels, The Grapes of Wrath was the strongest and most durable. It suffered from the flaws that Critic Maxwell Geismar found in much of his writing: "Simplification has been the source of his inspiration. Handling complex material rather too easily, he has been marked by the popularizing gift. Here is an urbanity of psyche bought a little easily." His eighth novel, the book was published in 1939, after Steinbeck made the westward pilgrimage with a caravan of Oklahoma farmers. Part exposé, part tract, Grapes was a concentration of Steinbeck's artistic and moral vision...
...superbly professional storyteller, but his work was at times flawed by facile allegorizing. In the preface to 1935's Tortilla Flat, an otherwise sharp and accurate novel of the innocent gaiety of the paisanos in Monterey, he wrote: "When you speak of Danny's house, you are understood to mean a unit of which the parts are men, from which came sweetness and joy, philanthropy and, in the end, a mystic sorrow. For Danny's house was not unlike the Round Table, and Danny's friends were not unlike the knights." In 1952's East...
Allegorical Tendencies. Steinbeck was an emotional, sentimental, yet extraordinarily powerful writer who frequently mined his personal experiences for the material of his fiction. He was born in Salinas, Calif. The region figures in his novels and stories, including East of Eden, Cannery Row and Of Mice and Men. The son of a miller and a Salinas Valley schoolteacher, he played basketball as a youth and read such works as Malory's Morte d'Arthur, Milton's Paradise Lost and the Bible-tastes that accounted perhaps for his allegorical tendencies. He entered Stanford in 1920, but left after...
...have felt for Effie in a measured view of the manners and morals of both parties and of the age in which they lived. For all its peephole pettiness, the story stirs the mind like a psychological melodrama and flows as smoothly as any contrived 18th century novel of manners. Whoever was right, whatever their pangs and posturings, the Ruskins emerge as vivid and graceful correspondents. If no book like this ever celebrates the famous domestic wrangles of the present day for future readers, part of the blame must be placed on the telephone...