Word: steinbecker
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...STEINBECK HAD a lifelong fascination with love and sex, but he never really trusted love. At one point he wrote, "A woman holds dreadful power over a man who is in love witm her but she should realize that the quality and force of his love is the index of his potential contempt and hatred." On a bleak fall day in 1948, he brooded on how to cope with life: "There is nothing anyone can do. It's something that has to be done alone. Even with women, and that's good, there is largely no companionship except...
...most disquieting passages in this collection are in the letters that Steinbeck wrote on politics. In one letter, he compared President Kennedy to Launcelot, and in 1965 he wrote President Johnson, "You have placed your name among the great ones in history. And I take great pride in the fact that you are my President." Concerning the war in Vietnam, he told Johnson aide Jack Valenti in April 1965, "I wish the bombing wasn't necessary, but I suspect that our people on the ground know more about that than I do." Less than a year later, however, he went...
...Steinbeck had a simple conception of his craft, he had a simple view of life as well--or at least that's what he claims. At one point he said...
...Steinbeck married three times and endured two divorces--both initiated by his wives, not by him--so it is not surprising that he focuses a great deal of his attention on women. "I like women," he writes. "It is only wives I am in trouble with." But there is little evidence that Steinbeck especially appreciated the company and conversation of women. In one bitter moment, he told a friend who was considering marriage, "I have thought that men and women should never come together except in bed. There is the only place where their natural hatred of each other...
...long after his creative peak, Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize. By that time, he was writing sentimental elegies to the American character like Travels with Charley and America and Americans. His last novel of any consequence, East of Eden, had been published over a decade earlier, and his most popular one, The Grapes of Wrath, preceded the prize by 35 years. In his last years, he grew increasingly reflective, feeling himself more and more a failure: "I consider the body of my work and I do not find it good. I'm not the young writer of promise anymore...