“I have come to believe that a great teacher
is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great
artists. Teaching might even be the
greatest of the arts, since the medium is the human mind and spirit.”—John Steinbeck.
Like many of the great writers of the early to mid-20th Century John Steinbeck was a newspaper reporter before he tried his hand at creative writing. And like many of his contemporaries, including good friend Ernest Hemingway, he spent time as a war correspondent during World War II following the phenomenal success of his 1939 novel, The Grapes of Wrath, which won both the National Book Award and The Pulitzer Prize.
A self-taught writer, he started at age
14 and in later life said he wished he would have spent more time under the
tutelage of some of the teachers who made a lifelong impression on him and his
work. The power of a good teacher, he
said, is immeasureable.
Steinbeck wrote a number of novels and short
stories that did not succeed, but many more that did, including Of Mice and Men, Tortilla Flats, and The Long Valley. Several of his books were made into
movies. In 1962, shortly before his
death, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his life’s body of
work.
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