Steinbeck, John (Vol. 1) | Steinbeck, John 1902–1968
Steinbeck, John 1902–1968
An American novelist and short story writer, Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize. His best-known novel is The Grapes of Wrath. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 1-4, rev. ed.; obituary, Vols. 25-28.)
[John Steinbeck] can produce pages of beauty and impact, preceded and followed by pages of sheer trash, the emptiness of which is only accentuated by the pseudo-grandeur or pseudo-primitivism of the diction. He can be acutely sensitive and true for a chapter, then embarrassingly sentimental and cheaply trite. He can write dialog with authenticity and bite, and go on to more dialog which is reverberant rhetorical noise. He can juxtapose a penetrating analysis of human feeling, especially of sense impression, and painfully artificial fabrication. In short, he has at least as many faults as he has felicities in his talent; his books are by no means rigorously weeded. Still, he has won both...
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