Nobel Peace Prize in Literature

Winner of at least five awards ranging from the Nobel Peace Prize in Literature to New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play. John Steinbeck has written around thirty-one books and even won the Nobel Peace Prize in Literature in 1962. Steinbeck was born on February twenty-seventh, 1902 in Salinas, California. Steinbeck’s parents were John Ernst Steinbeck, an accountant, and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck, a schoolteacher. He had two older sisters, Esther and Beth, and a younger sister, Mary. He was very active in high school he played on the football, track, and basketball teams acted in school plays, wrote articles for the yearbook, and was elected senior class president.

Steinbeck graduated from high school in 1919 and enrolled in the fall at Stanford University. Steinbeck jumped from job to job and enjoyed the Cuban high life for a little bit of time. Sadly we lost this amazing writing legend December twentieth 1968, in New York, New York at the age of sixty-six.

Steinbeck liked to incorporate many social issues into his writing. According to Gale Dictionary of Literary Biography, one of the social issues Steinbeck enjoyed to write about how different social and racial classes are treated. In one of Steinbeck’s novels, he wrote about how both Chinese immigrants and prostitutes face unfair criticism due to their background and line of work. While these are some of the kindest and hardest-working characters in the book, society does not always treat them as such. Another example is found in the book, Of Mice and Men.

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Steinbeck shows that friendship is important in preventing loneliness by providing a purpose in life and a sense of companionship. In the novel, it describes the life of a man who has the mentality of a child and his best friend. Their friendship is very strong and this is unusual due to other characters in the book being very lonely. One of the last social issue he focused on was in the novel East of Eden.

In this novel, he writes about Happiness and Steinbeck questions if material goods can bring happiness. He argues that true happiness comes from meaningful relationships between individuals. Life for minorities in the 1930s is very different from current times. In current times there is no more slavery, job opportunities are open to everyone no matter their ethnicity, and everyone is welcome in the public schooling system. But in the 1930s jobs were very limited, approximately half of black Americans were out of work, and whites called for blacks to be fired from any jobs as long as there were whites out of work. Racial violence also became more and more common according to the Great Depression and World War II, 1929-1945. For example, Gale U.S. History in Context says “Thirty-seven percent of working African Americans were employed as agricultural laborers and twenty-seven percent as personal-service and domestic workers. Only two percent were classified as professionals (lawyers, doctors, teachers, and clergy)” which means that at least ninety percent of professionals were whites.

But one of the most difficult burdens placed upon the minorities in the 1930s were the Jim Crow Laws. According to “Jim Crow Law, Britannica,” the Jim Crow Laws were a formal codified system of racial rules that dominated America for years beginning in the 1890s. The laws affected almost every aspect of life for most people of color. The laws mandated segregation of schools, parks, libraries, restrooms, buses, trains, restaurants and even drinking fountains. ‘Whites Only’ and ‘Colored’ signs were constant reminders of the enforced racial order.” The government presented to the nations that blacks would receive “separate but equal” treatment, but in reality, the whites facilities were always more desirable than those of the blacks. ‘Travel in the segregated South for black people was humiliating,’ recalled Diane Nash in her interview for Freedom Riders. ‘The very fact that there were separate facilities was to say to black people and white people that blacks were so subhuman and so inferior that we could not even use the public facilities that white people used.’ After years of fighting back and forth on the racial topic, the Jim Crow Laws were lifted in 1964.

The Great Depression was a worldwide economic downturn that began in 1929 and lasted until about 1939. It was the longest and most severe depression ever experienced by the industrialized Western World. Although it originated in the United States, the Great Depression caused drastic declines in output and severe unemployment. Its social and cultural effects were no less staggering, especially in the United States. Where the Great Depression represented the harshest adversity faced by Americans since the Civil War. In October 1929 the stock market crashed, wiping out forty percent of the paper values of common stock. However, Even after the stock market collapse politicians and industry leaders continued to issue optimistic predictions for the nation’s economy. But the Depression deepened, confidence evaporated, and many lost their life savings. By 1933 the value of a stock on the New York Stock Exchange was less than a fifth of what it had been at its peak in 1929. Business houses closed their doors, factories shut down and banks failed. Farm income fell fifty percent.

By 1932 approximately one out of every four Americans was unemployed. According to “Great Depression and World War II.” The core of the problem was the immense disparity between the country’s productive capacity and the ability of people to consume. Great innovations in production techniques during and after the war raised the output of industry beyond the purchasing capacity of U.S. farmers and wage earners. The savings of the wealthy and middle class, increasing far beyond the possibilities of sound investment, had been drawn into frantic speculation in stocks or real estate. The economy shrank fifty percent in the first five years of the ​depression. In 1929, economic output was $105 billion, as measured by gross domestic product. The Depression affected politics by badly shaking confidence in unfettered capitalism. That type of laissez-faire economics is what President Herbert Hoover advocated. As a result, people voted for Franklin Roosevelt. His Keynesian economics promised that government spending would end the Depression.

The New Deal worked. In 1934, the economy grew ten point eight percent in 1934 and unemployment declined. Wages for those who still had jobs fell forty-two percent. Average family incomes dropped forty percent from $2,300 in 1929 to $1,500 in 1933. As a result, the number of children sent to orphanages increased by fifty percent. Roughly 250,000 older children left home to find work. During the Depression, half of the nation’s banks failed. In the first ten months of 1930 alone, 744 failed. That was one thousand percent more than the annual rate in the 1920s. By 1933, four thousand banks had failed. As a result, depositors lost $140 billion. The stock market lost ninety percent of its value between 1929 and 1932. It did not recover for twenty-five years. People lost all confidence in Wall Street markets. Businesses, banks, and individual investors were wiped out.