Steinbeck Dies: Voice of America's Forgotten Workers

John Steinbeck died on December 20, 1968, in New York, at sixty-six. The FBI had kept a file on him for thirty years. His novels made powerful people uncomfortable, not in the abstract, but specific powerful people: the ones who ran the camps where Dust Bowl migrants worked for pennies, the ones who owned the canneries in Monterey, the ones who profited from the systems he described. The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1939, followed the Joad family from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to the California labor camps, documenting exploitation so precisely that California growers tried to ban the book. They burned copies. They demanded libraries remove it. Eleanor Roosevelt publicly defended it. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and has never gone out of print. Of Mice and Men, published two years earlier, became one of the most banned and most taught books in American education, a combination that suggests the people who fear literature and the people who teach it have identified the same power in the same text. Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, a decision that surprised him and irritated some critics who considered his best work behind him. The Swedish Academy cited his "realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception." Born in Salinas, California, in 1902, he drew his material from the agricultural communities of the Salinas Valley, where he worked as a ranch hand and laborer during summers. His other major works include East of Eden, Cannery Row, and The Winter of Our Discontent. He never quite believed he deserved the Nobel. The books suggest otherwise.