Abstract
Between the awarding of this important global prize and Steinbeck’s death in late 1968, he benefits from the prestige of having won the award—invited to tour for his country, receiving other kinds of awards. As his health deteriorates, he more frequently turns to journalism—doing a series of dispatches from Vietnam, and publishing his last book, America and Americans.
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Notes
- 1.
The Nobel awards between 1955 and John Steinbeck’s prize in 1962 went to Laxness (Iceland), Juan Ramón Jiménez (Spain), Albert Camus (France), Boris Pasternak (Russia), Salvatore Quasimodo (Italy), Saint-John Perse (France), and Ivo Andria (Yugoslavia). Then came Steinbeck’s award, which was followed by prizes to both Giorgos Seferis (Greece) and Jean-Paul Sartre (France). No other American would receive the Nobel until Saul Bellow, born in Canada, did so in 1974. One might note that in the twenty years between Hemingway’s receiving the Nobel in 1954 and Bellow’s in 1974, only Steinbeck was an American recipient.
- 2.
Steinbeck’s only other literary group membership had been his 1948 invitation to join the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He had been nominated for Academy Awards in 1944, 1945, and 1951 in the categories of “Best Story” and “Best Original Screenplay” for Lifeboat, A Medal for Benny, and Viva Zapata!, but movie awards do not equate to literary prominence.
- 3.
To John Murphy he had written, “I would greatly prefer to die in the middle of a sentence in the middle of a book and so leave it as all life must be—unfinished. That’s the law, the great law” (SLL 859).
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Wagner-Martin, L. (2017). The Nobel Prize for Literature. In: John Steinbeck. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55382-9_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55382-9_12
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