How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise - the … - John Steinbeck

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How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise - the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream - be set down alive? When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book - to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves.

John Steinbeck

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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.

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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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William Faulkner Ursula K. Le Guin Norman Mailer E. M. Forster Mark Twain

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In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.

I nearly forgot something my old father told me not long before he died. He said the threshold of insult is in direct relation to intelligence and security.

The only good writer was a dead writer.

How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise - the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream - be set down alive? When you collect … - John Steinbeck

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