Some people there are who, being grown, forget the horrible task of learning to read. It is perhaps the greatest single effort that the human underta… - John Steinbeck

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Engraved portrait of John Steinbeck, facing left

Some people there are who, being grown, forget the horrible task of learning to read. It is perhaps the greatest single effort that the human undertakes, and he must do it as a child. An adult is rarely successful in the undertaking — the reduction of experience to a set of symbols. For a thousand thousand years these humans have existed and they have only learned this trick — this magic — in the final ten thousand of the thousand thousand.

English
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About John Steinbeck

John Ernst Steinbeck Jr. (27 February 1902 – 20 December 1968) was an American writer. A recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, his works include the novella Of Mice and Men (1937) and the novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1940), both of which examine the lives of the working class and migrant workers during the Great Depression.

Biography information from Wikiquote · Portrait adapted from Wikimedia Commons, McFadden Publications, Inc.; no photographer credited; photo likely the work of Sonya Noskowiak, as Steinbeck is wearing the same clothes from her 1935 studio session that produced the work shown here: https://www.si.edu/object/npg_NPG.2006.74 (Public domain / CC0)

Also Known As

Birth Name: Jeffery Ernest Steinbeck
Alternative Names: John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. John Ernst Steinbeck John Ernest Steinbeck John Ernst Steinbeck Jr Steinbeck

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