“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 20th Century John Steinbeck, born this week in 1902, 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.
His writing career began 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. The power of a good teacher, he
said, is immeasureable.
While Steinbeck wrote a number of novels and short
stories that did not succeed, many more did, including Of Mice and Men, Tortilla Flats, and The Long Valley. Several of his books were made into
movies, and in 1962, shortly before his
death, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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