Word: steinbeck
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Critic Alfred Kazin suggests that "at bottom Steinbeck's gift was not so much a literary resource as a distinctively harmonious and pacific view of life. The Depression naturalists saw life as one vast Chicago slaughterhouse, a guerrilla war, a perpetual bombing raid. Steinbeck had picked up a refreshing belief in human fellowship and courage: he had learned to accept the rhythm of life...
...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...
Urbanity of Psyche. The critical derision that greeted the award from many quarters was rather unjust. When he was asked if he thought that he deserved the honor, Steinbeck replied: "Frankly, no." Yet, as Edmund Wilson observed in an otherwise critical essay: "There remains behind the journalism, the theatricalism and the tricks, a mind which does seem first-rate in its unpanicky scrutiny of life...
...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...
National Verities. Like Norman Thomas and Upton Sinclair, Steinbeck rebelled against injustices precisely because of a profound faith in man's perfectibility. The epic journey of the loads was a warning against the evils existing within the American system, but the migrants were presented as the actual guardians of all of the national verities: family loyalty, trust of neighbor, devotion to the land. Steinbeck's dogma was uncommonly wholesome for a radical of the '30s. Avoiding customary Communist cliches, he affirmed children, home, mother and young love. "Nothin' but us," says Ma Joad, "nothin...