Presentation Speech by Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy
John Steinbeck, the author awarded this
year's Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in the little town of
Salinas, California, a few miles from the Pacific coast near the
fertile Salinas Valley. This locality forms the background for
many of his descriptions of the common man's everyday life. He
was raised in moderate circumstances, yet he was on equal terms
with the workers' families in this rather diversified area. While
studying at Stanford University, he often had to earn his living
by working on the ranches. He left Stanford without graduating
and, in 1925, went to New York as a freelance writer. After
bitter years of struggling to exist, he returned to California,
where he found a home in a lonely cottage by the sea. There he
continued his writing.
Although he had already written several books by 1935, he
achieved his first popular success in that year with Tortilla
Flat. He offered his readers spicy and comic tales about a
gang of paisanos, asocial individuals who, in their wild
revels, are almost caricatures of King Arthur's Knights of the
Round Table. It has been said that in the United States this book
came as a welcome antidote to the gloom of the then prevailing
depression. The laugh was now on Steinbeck's side.
But he had no mind to be an unoffending comforter and
entertainer. The topics he chose were serious and denunciatory,
as for example the bitter strikes on California's fruit and
cotton plantations which he depicted in his novel In Dubious
Battle (1936). The power of his literary style increased
steadily during these years. The little masterpiece Of Mice
and Men (1937), which is the story of Lennie, the imbecile
giant who, out of tenderness, alone squeezes the life out of
every living creature that comes into his hands, was followed by
those incomparable short stories which he collected in the volume
The Long Valley (1938). The way had now been paved for the
great work that is principally associated with Steinbeck's name,
the epic chronicle The Grapes of Wrath (1939). This is the
story of the emigration to California which was forced upon a
group of people from Oklahoma through unemployment and abuse of
power. This tragic episode in the social history of the United
States inspired in Steinbeck a poignant description of the
experiences of one particular farmer and his family during their
endless, heartbreaking journey to a new home.
In this brief presentation it is not possible to dwell at any
length on individual works which Steinbeck later produced. If at
times the critics have seemed to note certain signs of flagging
powers, of repetitions that might point to a decrease in
vitality, Steinbeck belied their fears most emphatically with
The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), a novel published
last year. Here he attained the same standard which he set in
The Grapes of Wrath. Again he holds his position as an
independent expounder of the truth with an unbiased instinct for
what is genuinely American, be it good or bad.
In this recent novel, the central figure is the head of a family
who has come down in the world. After serving in the war, he
fails at whatever he tries until at last he is employed in the
simple work of a grocery store clerk in the New England town of
his forefathers. He is an honest man and he does not complain
without due cause, although he is constantly exposed to
temptation when he sees the means by which material success must
be purchased. However, such means require both hard
scrupulousness and moral obduracy, qualities he cannot muster
without risking his personal integrity. Tellingly displayed in
his sensitive conscience, irradiated like a prism, is a whole
body of questions which bear on the nation's welfare problems.
This is done without any theorizing, using concrete, or even
trivial, everyday situation, which are nonetheless convincing
when described with all of Steinbeck's vigorous and realistic
verve. Even with his insistence on the factual, there are
harmonic tones of daydreaming, fumbling speculations around the
eternal theme of life and death.
Steinbeck's latest book is an account of his experiences during a
three-month tour of forty American states Travels with
Charley, (1962). He travelled in a small truck equipped with
a cabin where he slept and kept his stores. He travelled
incognito, his only companion being a black poodle. We see here
what a very experienced observer and raisonneur he is. In
a series of admirable explorations into local colour, he
rediscovers his country and its people. In its informal way this
book is also a forceful criticism of society. The traveller in
Rosinante - the name which he gave his truck - shows a slight
tendency to praise the old at the expense of the new, even though
it is quite obvious that he is on guard against the temptation.
"I wonder why progress so often looks like destruction", he says
in one place when he sees the bulldozers flattening out the
verdant forest of Seattle to make room for the feverishly
expanding residential areas and the skyscrapers. It is, in any
case, a most topical reflection, valid also outside
America.
Among the masters of modern American literature who have already
been awarded this Prize - from Sinclair Lewis to Ernest Hemingway - Steinbeck more than
holds his own, independent in position and achievement. There is
in him a strain of grim humour which, to some extent, redeems his
often cruel and crude motif. His sympathies always go out to the
oppressed, to the misfits and the distressed; he likes to
contrast the simple joy of life with the brutal and cynical
craving for money. But in him we find the American temperament
also in his great feeling for nature, for the tilled soil, the
wasteland, the mountains, and the ocean coasts, all an
inexhaustible source of inspiration to Steinbeck in the midst of,
and beyond, the world of human beings.
The Swedish Academy's reason for awarding the prize to John
Steinbeck reads, "for his realistic as well as imaginative
writings, distinguished by a sympathetic humour and a keen social
perception."
Dear Mr. Steinbeck - You are not a stranger to the Swedish public
any more than to that of your own country and of the whole world.
With your most distinctive works you have become a teacher of
good will and charity, a defender of human values, which can well
be said to correspond to the proper idea of the Nobel Prize. In
expressing the congratulations of the Swedish Academy, I now ask
you to receive this year's Nobel Prize in Literature from the
hands of His Majesty, the King.
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1962