Freethinkers - Leo Tolstoy quote

Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking.

Leo Tolstoy

Born: August 28, 1828 
Tula Province, Russia 
Died: November 9, 1910 
Astapovo, Russia 
Russian novelist

The Russian novelist and moral philosopher (person who studies good and bad in relation to human life) Leo Tolstoy ranks as one of the world's great writers, and his War and Peace has been called the greatest novel ever written.

Read more: http://www.notablebiographies.com/St-Tr/Tolstoy-Leo.html#ixzz5MMV6KIKV 

Leo Tolstoy: the forgotten genius?

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jan/06/leo-tolstoy-the-last-station

Leo Tolstoy is widely considered in the west to be the greatest writer of all time and this year sees the release of a film, The Last Station, to mark the centenary of his death. So why is his native Russia lukewarm about the literary genius?

For Tolstoy fans, 2010 is set to be a wonderful year. One hundred years after the great Russian novelist fled from his country estate outside Moscow – dying three weeks later in a small provincial railway station – the world is gearing up to celebrate him. In Germany and the US there are fresh translations of Anna Karenina; in Cuba and Mexico Tolstoy bookfairs; worldwide, a new black- and-white documentary. Dug up from Russia's archives and restored, the ­ original cinema footage shows an elderly Tolstoy playing with his poodles and vaulting energetically on his horse.

Next month also sees the UK premiere of The Last Station, an accomplished new drama about Tolstoy's final days. Starring Helen Mirren, Christopher Plummer and James McAvoy, this witty biopic recounts the eventful last two years of his life. Under siege from fin de siècle paparazzi, Count Tolstoy and his wife Sofya Andreevna squabble over his literary estate. Tolstoy wants to leave the copyright to humanity; the countess wants the revenues herself. Tired of marital conflict, Tolstoy runs away, then falls ill and dies on his train journey south.

Based on the novel by Jay Parini, the film's central figure is Tolstoy's young private secretary, Valentin Bulgakov (McAvoy). During his later years, the novelist rejected property and fleshly pleasures, but Bulgakov's vow of Tolstoyan celibacy proves predictably short-lived: an attractive Tolstoy commune-member, Masha, relieves him of his virginity. There are strong performances from Mirren, Plummer and McAvoy, and the screenplay is pleasingly deft. Asked by Mrs Tolstoy whether he has read War and Peace, Bulgakov stammeringly replies: "Many times." There is a pause. He then concedes: "Well, twice."

One country, however, has so far conspicuously failed to share in this global Tolstoy mania – Russia. Rumour has it that Vladimir Putin toured Tolstoy's country estate incognito as a young KGB spy, but so far the Kremlin is not planning any major event to mark the centenary of Tolstoy's death on 20 November. Not only that, but the makers of The Last Station ended up shooting the film not among the birch trees and northern skylines of Tolstoy's Russia, but in the somewhat more genteel surroundings of rustic eastern Germany.

The movie's American director, Michael Hoffman, had intended to film The Last Station in Yasnaya Polyana, or Clear Glade, Tolstoy's pastoral family estate near Tula, 125 miles south of Moscow. "We wanted to do it in Russia, we really did," Andrei Deryabin, the film's co-producer, explains somewhat wistfully. "But there were no decent loos. There wasn't the infrastructure. The hotels were lousy. Nor were there any security guarantees for the actors. In the end, filming in Russia proved far too expensive."

According to Deryabin, there was also a more profound obstacle – Russia's surprising indifference to the genius behind War and Peace, Tolstoy's contrapuntal saga set during the years of Napoleon's wars in Europe and his invasion of Russia.

In the west, Tolstoy is generally rated as the greatest literary novelist: last July, Newsweek placed War and Peace at the top of its meta-list of 100 great novels. (Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four snuck in second, with Joyce's Ulysses third.) Critics hail the extraordinary psychology of Tolstoy's characters, and veterans say nobody has written better about battle. And the east, especially Japan, reveres Tolstoy's philosophy. "Across the whole world there is a huge Tolstoy boom. He's esteemed everywhere apart from here [in Russia]," Deryabin admits.

Russia's scant regard is connected to its own troubled existential journey, Deryabin suggests, and its failure to discover a national idea. "We have been searching for it for long time. In fact, the answer is the one given by Tolstoy: the task before humanity is to be happy now."

Deryabin concedes that, for most Russians, the previous century was pretty awful – in other words, more Dostoevskyan than Tolstoyan. "The last century, with its emphasis on darkness and suffering, was Dostoevsky's. Now I hope it's Tolstoy's turn," he says.

The writer's great-great grandson, Vladimir Ilyich Tolstoy, agrees that Russia's painful 20th century had a distinctly Dostoevskyan tone. "I hope the 21st century is Tolstoyan," he says. Vladimir is the director of the state literary museum at Yasnaya Polyana. With his sweeping Tolstoyan forehead, he is instantly recognisable as a member of the distinguished Tolstoy clan.

"Dostoevsky focuses his attention on painful problems, on the dark side of the human soul. Tolstoy is the opposite. He defends fundamental values such as love, friendship and family relations. He gives positive answers to the questions mankind is asking. In this sense he gives more hope," Vladimir says.

He has transformed Yasnaya into Russia's leading cultural attraction. Thousands of curious literary pilgrims visit each year. Many of them arrive on special Saturday and Sunday trains from Moscow, the Tolstoy Express. The train is festively decorated with scenes from Tolstoy's writings; I travelled in a cosy carriage devoted to his years in the Caucasus – a period that provided Tolstoy with the inspiration for several works, including his astonishing late novella Hadji Murad, but which his diaries reveal as a period of gambling and "girls". There is, naturally enough, a War and Peace carriage.

From Kozlova Zaseka station, a cranky old bus takes you up to Tolstoy's house. Everything is much at it was in his time: in the classical creeper-covered manor, you can peer at the black leather sofa on which the author and his 13 children were born. There is the stoopingly low chair from which he wrote; and an ornamental gold dog Tolstoy slept with under his pillow as a boy. In a limpid dining room are portraits of Tolstoy and his family by the painter Repin; round the corner is his 22,000-volume library; in the woods is his unmarked oblong grave.

Reverential tour guides escort small groups past Count Tolstoy's duck pond and up an avenue of high trees. There is an apple orchard; geese wander among the farm buildings; you can strike off into the birch woods where Tolstoy hunted hares and foxes and shot at woodcocks. In general, he missed.

The nearby village where Tolstoy tried to educate peasant children in the 1860s still exists – now, as then, something of a dump; yet so evocative is the atmosphere that it wouldn't be surprising if Tolstoy himself burst from the lime trees wearing his peasant smock. (In Russian, of course, he isn't Leo but Lev, or Lev Nikolaevich – with the stress in Russian on the second syllable of Tolstoy.)

According to Vladimir, the number of tourists visiting Yasnaya Polyana has increased over the past 15 years – many of them foreigners. There is also a growing interest in the life and diary of Sofya Andreevna, who worked as Tolstoy's literary amanuensis.

Vladimir says he was agreeably surprised at The Last Station, a German- Russian co-production with an almost entirely British cast (Plummer, who plays Tolstoy, is Canadian). Vladimir's daughter Anastasia – currently a post-graduate student at Oxford – appears as an extra in Tolstoy's death scene. Hoffman picked her because of her Russian face; it has to be said, however, that some of the other peasant extras appear rather too Germanically well-fed.

"I liked the film," Vladimir says. "The actors are perfect. And the music is beautiful. It's terribly difficult to make a movie about the last years of his life; you have to be very precise and delicate. Helen Mirren doesn't resemble Sofya at all, but her performance is brilliant." Some Russians, however, have balked at Mirren's unapologetically Anglophone pronunciation of Russian family names. "It's a bit odd to hear her say 'Valentin Fiodorovich'," the film critic Andrei Plakhov noted in Kommersant newspaper.

Like Deryabin, Vladimir Tolstoy admits that his ancestor's reputation is higher in the west than in Russia. This, he says, is due to the political upheaval in Russia since the break-up of the Soviet Union, and the contemporary emphasis on visual, rather than intellectual, culture. Russia's book-reading, scientific middle class has also shrunk compared to communist times.

The Kremlin, meanwhile, shows little interest in Russia's most celebrated novelist. Putin has never mentioned Tolstoy in his speeches. And the writer's criticisms of Orthodox religion and authority make him a dangerous figure for those in power – both in Tsarist Russia and also today, Vladimir believes. "Nobody is trying to throw out the idea that he is the author of great novels. But they [official Russia] don't know what to do with his views," he says.

Tolstoy's lingering feud with Russia's Orthodox church is part of the problem. The church excommunicated him in 1901, unhappy with his novel Resurrection and Tolstoy's espousal of Christian anarchist and pacifist views. In 2001, the church reaffirmed Tolstoy's excommunication, and conservative Russian Orthodox thinkers have even placed Tolstoy's works on a blacklist.

Others whisper that Tolstoy's beliefs make him un-Russian. They also moan about his unwieldy syntax. And it is hard to imagine that Tolstoy would have kind things to say in return about Putin's bureaucratic-authoritarian state, in which black-robed priests wearing clunky gold crosses appear on pro-Kremlin talkshows.

"I feel that Leo Tolstoy needs to be defended. We need to support him morally, intellectually and emotionally," says Ludmilla Saraskina, Russia's foremost expert on Dostoevsky, and an acclaimed scholar of 19th-century Russian literature. She adds that the writer is under attack in modern-day Russia from the same reactionary forces he himself criticised – the state, the army and the church. "He's not in fashion," she says.

Saraskina is one of several dozen academics who will defiantly take part this summer in a Tolstoy centenary conference at Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy's 100-plus direct descendants are also turning up for a big family party.

Some believe the reason Tolstoy has fallen out of fashion in Russia is the fact that every Russian child has to read him at school (one Russian journalist attending a press conference on Tolstoy confessed to me that she had been "overstuffed" with his work while a teenager). In Soviet times, Lenin's view of Tolstoy prevailed: that his indictment of Tsarism made him a prophet of revolution. These days, all Russian 15-year-olds study War and Peace as part of their national curriculum. In theory, the girls are supposed to like the love scenes, with the boys captivated by the battle stuff.

In fact, girls at Moscow's state secondary school 1,275 take an intriguingly unforgiving attitude to Natasha Rostova, Tolstoy's heroine. In particular, they dislike Natasha's decision to dump her fiance, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, in favour of the snake-like Anatole Kuragin. (To be fair, Prince Andrei has gone away for a year, and she is unaware that Kuragin is already married.) "I don't like the way she cheated on Prince Andrei. I can't forgive her for that," Vera Sinotina, aged 17, explains.

The girls say they like the details of aristocratic life in War and Peace, a world away from the vulgar behaviour of Russia's present elite, but it's clear that they admire other Russian authors – especially Dostoevsky and Mikhail Bulgakov – a bit more. "It's criminal that Russian kids have to read Tolstoy aged 14 and 15. They should read him much later," says Sergei Yevtushenko, who composed the much-acclaimed soundtrack for The Last Station while in London.

Oddly, the only country where The Last Station has yet to secure a cinema distribution deal is Russia. Deryabin is also working on a second film, Leo Tolstoy: Genius Alive, which will be shown on 20 November, 2010, the day that Tolstoy died of pneumonia at Astapovo station aged 82 – an event that triggered mourning across Russia and the world.

The 72-minute feature documentary is made up of rare black-and-white cinema footage of Tolstoy, shot at Yasnaya in 1908. It brings the sage of Yasnaya vividly back to life: Tolstoy can be seen getting on a train, scuttling off into the woods, and handing out alms to the poor – a long, wispy-bearded figure who looks very much like a living saint.

Meanwhile in a scene from The Last Station, Countess Tolstoy turns to her guests, seated around a table in the garden, and exclaims: "You all think he's Christ, don't you? Well, he's not."

Coming alive by disappearing (ego)

“There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist.” 
― Fernando Pessoa

Let's celebrate our differences! 

Cheers

Jeanne

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/04/fernando-pessoas-disappearing-act

Pretty interesting poet here, this is a very long article. For the whole thing click on the link above. Here is the first few paragraphs:

Fernando Pessoa’s Disappearing Act

The mysterious masterpiece of Portugal’s great modernist.

By Adam Kirsch

“The Book of Disquiet” was found, in fragments, only after Pessoa’s death.

Illustration by Riccardo Vecchio

If ever there was a writer in flight from his name, it was Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa is the Portuguese word for “person,” and there is nothing he less wanted to be. Again and again, in both poetry and prose, Pessoa denied that he existed as any kind of distinctive individual. “I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist,” he writes in one poem. “I’m the gap between what I’d like to be and what others have made of me. . . . That’s me. Period.”

In his magnum opus, “The Book of Disquiet”—a collage of aphorisms and reflections couched in the form of a fictional diary, which he worked on for years but never finished, much less published—Pessoa returns to the same theme: “Through these deliberately unconnected impressions I am the indifferent narrator of my autobiography without events, of my history without a life. These are my Confessions and if I say nothing in them it’s because I have nothing to say.”

This might sound like an unpromising basis for a body of creative work that is now considered one of the greatest of the twentieth century. If a writer is nothing, does nothing, and has nothing to say, what can he write about? But, like the big bang, which took next to nothing and turned it into a cosmos, the expansive power of Pessoa’s imagination turned out to need very little raw material to work with. Indeed, he belongs to a distinguished line of European writers, from Giacomo Leopardi, in the early nineteenth century, to Samuel Beckett, in the twentieth, for whom nullity was a muse. The ultimate futility of all accomplishment, the fascination of loneliness, the way sorrow colors our perception of the world: Pessoa’s insight into his favorite themes was purchased at a high price, but he wouldn’t have had it any other way. “To find one’s personality by losing it—faith itself subscribes to that sense of destiny,” he wrote.

The facts of Pessoa’s destiny are briefly told. Born in Lisbon in 1888, he moved to South Africa at the age of seven, when his stepfather was appointed Portuguese consul in Durban. He excelled at English, winning prizes for his school essays, and wrote English verse throughout his life. In 1905, he moved back to Lisbon to study at the university there. After two years, however, a student strike shut down the campus, and Pessoa dropped out.

For the rest of his life, he devoted himself to reading and writing while supporting himself as a freelance translator of business correspondence. He never married, and while biographers speculate about his sexuality—“I was never one who in love or friendship / Preferred one sex over the other,” he writes in one poem—it is possible that he died a virgin. He was involved in several literary enterprises, including a famous magazine, Orpheu, which, though it ran for only two issues, is considered responsible for introducing modernism to Portugal. He published just one book during his lifetime—“Message,” a collection of poems inspired by Portuguese history, which appeared in 1934. He was a familiar figure in Lisbon’s literary world, but when he died, in 1935, at the age of forty-seven, he had no major achievements to his name. It might well have seemed that he had had “a history without a life.”

But Pessoa was to have an extraordinary afterlife, as he prophesied in his poem “If I Die Young”: “roots may be hidden in the ground / But their flowers flower in the open air for all to see. / It must be so. Nothing can prevent it.” Among his belongings when he died was a large trunk, containing more than twenty-five thousand manuscript pages—the product of a lifetime of nearly graphomaniacal productivity. As Richard Zenith, one of his leading English translators, has written, Pessoa composed “on loose sheets, in notebooks, on stationery from the firms where he worked, on the backs of letters, on envelopes, or on whatever scrap of paper happened to be in reach.”

This cache of documents, which now resides in Portugal’s National Library, contained enough masterpieces to make Pessoa the greatest Portuguese poet of his century—indeed, probably the greatest since Luís de Camões, the sixteenth-century author of the country’s national epic, “The Lusiads.” Among the papers, too, were the hundreds of entries that make up “The Book of Disquiet”—but in no particular order, leaving successive editors to impose their own vision on the work. The first publication of the book was in 1982, nearly fifty years after Pessoa’s death. A newly published English translation, by Margaret Jull Costa, is called “The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition” (New Directions), and it is based on a Portuguese edition by Jerónimo Pizarro, which came out in 2013. This was the first version that attempted to put all the entries in chronological order, as best as can be established from Pessoa’s dating and other sources.

In addition to the size and the disorder of the Pessoa archive, there is another confounding level of complexity: it is, in a sense, the work of many writers. In his manuscripts, and even in personal correspondence, Pessoa attributed much of his best writing to various fictional alter egos, which he called “heteronyms.” Scholars have tabulated as many as seventy-two of these. His love of invented names began early: at the age of six, he wrote letters under the French name Chevalier de Pas, and soon moved on to English personae such as Alexander Search and Charles Robert Anon. But the major heteronyms he used in his mature work were more than jokey code names. They were fully fledged characters, endowed with their own biographies, philosophies, and literary styles. Pessoa even imagined encounters among them, and allowed them to comment on one another’s work. If he was empty, as he liked to claim, it was not the emptiness of a void but of a stage, where these selves could meet and interact.

Now

Enlightenment for a wave in the ocean is the moment the
wave realizes that it is water." 
~ Thich Nhat Hanh The Age Of Awareness.



'Freedom from fear' could be said to sum up the whole philosophy of human rights. 
Dag Hammarskjold

It is when we all play safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity. 
Dag Hammarskjold

Just One More Day

Wow I miss my Mom “But there's a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother's story, because hers is where yours begin.”  ― Mitch Albom, For One More Day https://mitchalbom.com/books/for-one-more-day/ For One More Day is the story of a mother and a son, and a relationship that covers a lifetime and beyond. It explores the question: What would you do if you could spend one more day with a lost loved one? As a child, Charley “Chick” Benetto was told by his father, “You can be a mama’s boy or a daddy’s boy, but you can’t be both.” So he chooses his father, only to see the man disappear when Charley is on the verge of adolescence. Decades later, Charley is a broken man. His life has been crumbled by alcohol and regret. He loses his job. He leaves his family. He hits bottom after discovering his only daughter has shut him out of her wedding. And he decides to take his own life. He makes a midnight ride to his small hometown, with plans to do himself in. But upon failing even to do that, he staggers back to his old house, only to make an astonishing discovery. His mother — who died eight years earlier — is still living there, and welcomes him home as if nothing ever happened. Albom has said his relationship with his own mother was largely behind the story of the book, and that several incidents in “For One More Day” are actual events from his childhood. Winner of Spain’s prestigious  “La Pluma de Plata” Award. One last column for a one-of-a-kind mom by Mitch Albom | Jan 25, 2015 | Detroit Free Press | 1 comment Over the years in this space, I have, occasionally, written about my mother. I once wrote a Halloween column on how she made me the Mummy. (She wrapped me in toilet paper, which was fine until it started raining.) I wrote about how she marched me into the library after a librarian had told me “that book’s too hard for you” and my mother yelled, “Never tell a child something is too hard for him! And never THIS child!” I wrote about how she insisted I stay in college, even when my father lost his job. How she refused to learn e-mail because she feared I would stop calling her. How I beckoned her to the stage at the Fox Theatre during a charity benefit, and a friend yelled out, “She’s in the bathroom!” I wrote what it was like feeding her after her stroke, a spoonful at a time. And, finally, what it was like to stare at her as she withered, wondering whether she knew me at all. The difference between all those columns and this one is pretty simple. I could show her those. I can’t show her this. She is gone. Funny, fierce and loyal We lost her gradually, first her balance, then her movement, then her speech, her recognition and finally, last weekend, her breath. She did our family a final kindness going that way, because she was too great a force to disappear all at once. Instead, like one of those NASA rockets, she stripped away piece by piece en route to the heavens. How can I tell you about my mother? How do I fit her 84 years into words? She didn’t change the world. Only our world. She didn’t run a country. Only our country. She lost her father when she was 15, and with him went her dreams of college and medical school. Instead, she became a teenaged parent to her heartbroken mother and younger brother. She married the only man she ever dated, my father, when she was 20. They wed on Christmas Eve, because the restaurant was available. For six years they lived with my grandmother, who made no apologies for bursting through their bedroom at any hour. No surprise, my folks remained childless until they moved out. How can I tell you about my mother? She went by Rhoda, Rho, Aunt Rho, Mrs. A or Bubby. She was funny and fierce and loyal and brilliant and while she never became a doctor, everyone ran to her for advice. She was loving, wise and patient and she cared not a whit what the world thought. She used to say, “The masses are asses.” She volunteered as a clown in hospitals and in fund-raising for ALS. She taught herself interior design and became one of the most-respected designers in the Philadelphia area. In death, she leaves her mark all over the country, in armoires, ottomans, wallpapers and throw pillows. Remembering her voice She loved to walk while holding her children’s hands, she loved to sing and twirl us around in a dance. She loved to jump into our affairs, no matter how much we might resist, and she once actually said to me, “Mitchie, if you let me, I could straighten out your life.” Yes. She called me Mitchie. Only a mother can do that, right? It’s funny. Over the last five years, as she slowly slipped away, I lost the sound of her voice. I only saw the suffering body in front of me, the locked arms, the grimaced expression, the 80-pound skeleton wearing an adult diaper. The horror of that seemed to muzzle my memory. But now that she is gone, her voice is coming back. And so is the reminder of how truly, truly loved I was, and how much I miss it. How can I tell you about my mother? This might sound silly. But in the 1941 movie”Dumbo,” there’s a scene where the captured mother elephant, through the bars of a cage, cradles little Dumbo in her trunk and sings: Baby mine, don’t you cry Baby mine, dry your eyes Rest your head, close to my heart Never to part Baby of mine I choke up whenever I see that, because I know that feeling. Forever loved, forevercomforted, through whatever bars may separate you, never to part. If this is the last column I write about my mother, then you should know. That was what it felt like to be her son. And it was glorious. Contact Mitch Albom: malbom@freepress.com. Check out the latest updates with his charities, books and events at MitchAlbom.com. Catch “The Mitch Albom Show” 5-7 p.m. weekdays on WJR-AM (760). Follow him on Twitter @mitchalbom. To read his recent columns, go to freep.com/sports/mitch-albom.

Writing quote; life quote John Steinbeck

“When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.” 
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America 

  

I could spend many mornings browsing Steinbeck quotes. Enjoy!

Travels with Charley: In Search of America

by 

John Steinbeck

A quest across America, from the northernmost tip of Maine to California’s Monterey Peninsula

To hear the speech of the real America, to smell the grass and the trees, to see the colors and the light—these were John Steinbeck's goals as he set out, at the age of fifty-eight, to rediscover the country he had been writing about for so many years.

With Charley, his French poodle, Steinbeck drives the interstates and the country roads, dines with truckers, encounters bears at Yellowstone and old friends in San Francisco. Along the way he reflects on the American character, racial hostility, the particular form of American loneliness he finds almost everywhere, and the unexpected kindness of strangers.  

Here is a link to an interesting article about the book

https://nytimes.com/2011/04/04/books/steinbecks-travels-with-charley-gets-a-fact-checking.html

John Steinbeck Biography

Born: February 27, 1902 
Salinas, California 
Died: December 20, 1968 
New York, New York 
American writer

John Steinbeck, American author and winner of the Nobel Prize in 1962, was a leading writer of novels about the working class and was a major spokesman for the victims of the Great Depression (a downturn in the American system of producing, distributing, and using goods and services in the 1930s, and during which time millions of people lost their jobs).

Early life

John Ernst Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California, the only son of John Ernst Steinbeck Sr. and Olive Hamilton. His father was a bookkeeper and accountant who served for many years as the treasurer of Monterey County, California. Steinbeck received his love of literature from his mother, who was interested in the arts. His favorite book, and a main influence on his writing, was Sir Thomas Malory's (c. 1408–1471) Le Morte d'Arthur, a collection of the legends of King Arthur. Steinbeck decided while in high school that he wanted to be a writer. He also enjoyed playing sports and worked during the summer on various ranches.

Steinbeck worked as a laboratory assistant and farm laborer to support himself through six years of study at Stanford University, where he took only those courses that interested him without seeking a degree. In 1925 he traveled to New York (by way of the Panama Canal) on a freighter (boat that carries inventory). After arriving in New York, he worked as a reporter and as part of a construction crew building Madison Square Garden. During this time he was also collecting impressions for his first novel. Cup of Gold (1929) was an unsuccessful attempt at romance involving the pirate Henry Morgan.

Begins writing seriously

Undiscouraged, Steinbeck returned to California to begin work as a writer of serious fiction. A collection of short stories, The Pastures of Heaven (1932), contained vivid descriptions of rural (farm) life among the "unfinished children of nature" in his native California valley. His second novel, To a God Unknown (1933), was his strongest statement about man's relationship to the land. With Tortilla Flat (1935) Steinbeck received critical and popular success; there are many critics who consider it his most artistically satisfying work.

John Steinbeck.

Steinbeck next dealt with the problems of labor unions in In Dubious Battle (1936), an effective story of a strike (when workers all decide to stop working as a form of protest against unfair treatment) by local grape pickers. Of Mice and Men (1937), first conceived as a play, is a tightly constructed novella (short novel) about an unusual friendship between two migrant workers (laborers who travel to wherever there is available work, usually on farms). Although the book is powerfully written and often moving, some critics feel that it lacks a moral vision.

Steinbeck's series of articles for the San Francisco Chronicle on the problems of migrant farm laborers provided material for The Grapes of Wrath (1939), his major novel and the finest working-class novel of the 1930s. The Grapes of Wrath relates the struggle of a family of Oklahoma tenant farmers forced to turn over their land to the banks. The family then journeys across the vast plains to the promised land of California—only to be met with scorn when they arrive. It is a successful example of social protest in fiction, as well as a convincing tribute to man's will to survive. The Grapes of Wrath received the Pulitzer Prize in 1940.

Other subjects

During World War II (1939–45), which the United States entered to help other nations battle Germany, Italy, and Japan, Steinbeck served as a foreign correspondent. From this experience came such nonfiction as Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team (1942);Once There Was a War (1958), a collection of Steinbeck's dispatches from 1943; and A Russian Journal (1948), with photographs by Robert Capa. More interesting nonfiction of this period is The Sea of Cortez, coauthored with scientist Edward F. Ricketts. This account of the two explorers' research into sea life provides an important key to many of the themes and attitudes featured in Steinbeck's novels.

Steinbeck's fiction during the 1940s includes The Moon Is Down (1942), a tale of the Norwegian resistance to occupation by the Nazis (German ruling party that scorned democracy and considered all non-German people, especially Jews, inferior); Cannery Row(1944), a return to the setting of Tortilla Flat; The Wayward Bus (1947); and The Pearl, a popular novella about a poor Mexican fisherman who discovers a valuable pearl that brings bad luck to his family.

Later decline

In the 1950s Steinbeck's artistic decline was evident with a series of novels that were overly sentimental, stuffy, and lacking in substance. The author received modest critical praise in 1961 for his more ambitious novel The Winter of Our Discontent, a study of the moral disintegration (falling apart) of a man of high ideals. In 1962 Travels with Charley, a pleasantly humorous account of his travels through America with his pet poodle, was well received. Following the popular success of the latter work, Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Steinbeck's work remains popular in both the United States and Europe, chiefly for its social consciousness and concern and for the narrative qualities displayed in the early novels. Although he refused to settle into political conservatism (preferring to maintain traditions and resist change) in his later years, his all-embracing support of American values and acceptance of all national policies, including the Vietnam War (1955–75; conflict in which the United States fought against Communist North Vietnam when they invaded Democratic South Vietnam), lost him the respect of many liberal (preferring social change) intellectuals who had once admired his social commitments. He died on December 20, 1968, in New York City.

Biography from: http://notablebiographies.com/Sc-St/Steinbeck-John.html

From some of the interesting facts about Steinbeck: 

Steinbeck shied away from the public eye, and largely avoided interviews, awards ceremonies, lectures, and publicity events. “The fact that I have housemaid’s knees or fear yellow gloves has little to do with the books I write,” he once said. One notable exception was his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, delivered on December 10, 1962. Here’s the speech in full: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SKEODtaQUU 

For More Information

Benson, Jackson J. John Steinbeck, Writer: A Biography. New York; Penguin Books, 1990.

Lynch, Audry. Steinbeck Remembered. Santa Barbara: Fithian Press, 2000.

Moore, Harry T. The Novels of John Steinbeck: A First Critical Study. Chicago: Normandie House, 1939, revised edition 1977.

Parini, Jay. John Steinbeck: A Biography. New York: H. Holt, 1995.

Steinbeck, John IV, and Nancy Steinbeck. The Other Side of Eden: Life with John Steinbeck. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2001.

Attachments area

Preview YouTube video John Steinbeck gives Nobel Prize Speech

John Steinbeck gives Nobel Prize Speech

For Pete

“Do what you love to do and give it your very best. Whether it’s business or baseball, or the theater, or any field. If you don’t love what you’re doing and you can’t give it your best, get out of it. Life is too short."

Al Lopez

Al Lopez, (Alfonso Ramon Lopez; “El Señor”), American baseball player and manager. The child of Spanish immigrants, he was called “El Señor” for his gentlemanliness. Lopez entered the Hall of Fame in 1977. 

This week's quote is in honour of my brother in law, Pete Heeney, who died suddenly last Wednesday. Pete loved baseball and was a gentleman. He touched many lives as a teacher, baseball and hockey player and coach, friend, and family guy. Pete was 59 and had only another year or so to go until he could retire. I was in the bottom of the Grand Canyon when it happened, expecting everything to be the same when I returned and it wasn't. No time to say goodbye, no time to say the words "we love you Pete and are happy you have been in our family for the past 23 years". I am comforted that I'm sure he knew we felt that, but man what I wouldn't give for a chance to actually tell him! It was funny to me (in a comical funny way) that Pete was one of the few people who said he didn't want to be on my "Quote list". I think he thought I send out "spiritual mush" each week lol. Ironic that this is the mushiest I've gotten (I think...)

For any of my close friends and relatives reading this if you are interested there is a scholarship in Pete's name started at the school in Burlington where he taught. Here is the link:

https://www.gofundme.com/peter-heeney-scholarship

Live what you Love!!

Jeanne