Steinbeck anniversary...

October 25, 1962

The Nobel Prize Goes to...

Acclaimed American novelist John Steinbeck is awarded Nobel Prize in Literature for his “realistic and imaginative writing, combining as it does sympathetic humor and keen social perception.” Born and raised in the Salinas Valley region of California, he is perhaps best known for his novels that recount the hardships of the working class during the Great Depression of the 1930s, such as Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. Over the course of his career, Steinbeck plies his pen as a playwright, screenwriter and war correspondent, and will see musical mavens Rodgers and Hammerstein turn his novel Sweet Thursday into their 1955 show Pipe Dream. Of his Nobel Prize, Steinbeck writes a friend, “This prize business is only different from the Lettuce Queen of Salinas in degree.”