John Steinbeck on What Writers Do

I think I had read more John Steinbeck before prison than any other major American writer than William Faulkner. Even then it had been a long time between the last time I had read Steinbeck (probably East of Eden) and prison where I sat down to read all the prison's leisure library had of Steinbeck. I finally read Grapes of Wrath. I know his reputation has suffered since he got the Nobel Prize for Literature. That, and thinking I had read his Nobel lecture, I did not review his lecture until after several other writers. This is what I thought was relevant to my search for what other writers thought was their job.

Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches – nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.

Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.

The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species.

Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion. My great predecessor, William Faulkner, speaking here, referred to it as a tragedy of universal fear so long sustained that there were no longer problems of the spirit, so that only the human heart in conflict with itself seemed worth writing about.

This is not new. The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.

Furthermore, the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit – for gallantry in defeat – for courage, compassion and love.

In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally-flags of hope and of emulation.

Maybe he was just too optimistic for what came 1962.