Word: steinbeck
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...hours of hot passions and cold revenge, old money and dirty money, macho patriarchs and mysterious paternities, good people worrying about, doing right and bad people having fun doing wrong were not enough, ABC has reserved three nights (Sunday, Monday and Wednesday) next week for an adaptation of John Steinbeck's 1952 novel, East of Eden. While this eight-hour TV movie has clear cultural pretensions, it is really 99-and-44/100% pure soap...
...five-member school board in 1973 ordered the confiscation and burning of three books that, according to Professor Jenkinson, none of the members had read: Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, James Dickey's Deliverance and an anthology of short stories by writers like Joseph Conrad, John Steinbeck and William Faulkner. Said the school superintendent Slater: "I don't regret it one bit, and we'd do it again. I'm just sorry about all the publicity that we got." In Warsaw, Ind., a gaggle of citizens in 1977 publicly burned 40 copies of Values Clarifications...
Even here there were problems, he notes, for it is very difficult to find authors whom Soviet authorities consider acceptable. What is "correct" one day may be banned the next. For a long time, for example, John Steinbeck was one of the most popular American writers in the Soviet Union. But when he went to Vietnam and wrote about his experiences there, the Soviet press criticized him severely. Publication of all of his works was stopped in 1968, and did not resume for another ten years...
Such towering works as Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath earned him a Nobel Prize in 1962. But the honor did not bring a revival. Steinbeck declined into illness and disillusion. Kiernan reports that when the author died at 66, in 1968, he "had grudgingly accepted the fact that his own artistic productivity had long ended" - as evidenced by the potboilers that marred his later years: East of Eden and The Winter of Our Discontent...
...wrote Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath, "unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments." His finest novels were proof of that perception. The other works are simply more evidence that some writers were never meant to grow...