“It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second." -- one of America's greatest writers John Steinbeck, from "Cannery Row" 1945. Steinbeck, whose 120th birthday anniversary is celebrated today, was famous for his humanistic novels with a social conscience from the 1930s to the 1960s. "Of Mice and Men," "The Grapes of Wrath," "East of Eden," "Lifeboat," "Tortilla Flat," and "Travels With Charley" are the best known of his works.
Steinbeck won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 1962 Nobel Prize for Literature. With his pro-worker, left-leaning positions during the '30s and beyond, Steinbeck was harassed by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI and by the right-wing House Un-American Committee in the early 1950s for his affiliation with the Communist-influenced League of American writers in the mid-1930s during the Great Depression.
(photo: John Steinbeck in 1937. Peter Stackpole via Getty Images)
