John Steinbeck
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Kitsch's enormous profits are a source of temptation to the avant-garde itself, and its members have not always resisted this temptation. Ambitious writers and artists will modify their work under the pressure of kitsch, if they do not succumb to it entirely. And then those puzzling borderline cases appear, such as the popular novelist, Simenon, in France, and Steinbeck in this country. The net result is always to the detriment of true culture in any case." --"Avant-garde and Kitsch", Clement Greenberg, 1939 |
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John Ernst Steinbeck (February 27 1902 – December 20 1968) was one of the best-known and most widely read American writers of the 20th century, best-kown for Of Mice and Men (1937) and the The Grapes of Wrath (1939), both of which examine the lives of the working class and migrant workers during the Dust Bowl and subsequent Great Depression.
Steinbeck often populated his stories with struggling characters, and his stories drew on real historical conditions and events in the first half of the 20th century. His body of work reflects his wide range of interests. They were marine biology, jazz, politics, philosophy, history, and myth.
Seventeen of his works, including Cannery Row (1945), The Pearl (1947), and East of Eden (1952), went on to become Hollywood films, and Steinbeck also achieved success as a Hollywood writer, receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Story in 1944 for Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat.
