Where's the literary love for John Steinbeck? Seriously. Come on literary establishment, he was the bomb! Robert Gottlieb, in the New York Review of Books takes a look at Steinbeck forty years after his death. To note, Of Mice and Men is my favorite book, and I've enjoyed all sorts of other Steinbeck tales (from The Pearl to Travels with Charley to Cannery Row) and I also have a nice collection of Steinbeck first editions, including a first edition of his first novel, Cup of Gold so, yeah, I appreciate the guy.
From the story:
So if all of Steinbeck is in print forty years after his death (in 1968), and despite the force-feeding of hundreds of thousands of school kids with his work—and official canonization by the Library of America—why is he so decisively off the literary map? Other than Brad Leithauser, who in 1989 published a perceptive fiftieth-anniversary homage to The Grapes of Wrath, who in America considers him seriously today, apart from a handful of Steinbeck academics and some local enthusiasts in Monterey?
Nor is dismissal of his work by the literary establishment anything new. When to everyone's surprise, including his own, he won the 1962 Nobel Prize, the reaction was startlingly hostile. "Without detracting in the least from Mr. Steinbeck's accomplishments," ran a New York Times editorial, "we think it interesting that the laurel was not awarded to a writer ...whose significance, influence and sheer body of work had already made a more profound impression on the literature of our age." And on the eve of the award ceremony in Stockholm, Arthur Mizener, again in the Times, questioned why the Nobel committee would reward a writer whose "limited talent is, in his best books, watered down by tenth-rate philosophizing." It's a question difficult to answer. (Steinbeck himself had doubts. When asked by a reporter whether he believed he deserved the prize, he responded, "Frankly, no.")
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