John Steinbeck

Award won Role or nomination

1. 1902 age 0

   Born

2. 1940 age 38

   CreditThe Grapes of Wrathscreenwriter

3. 1944 age 42

   CreditLifeboatscreenwriter

4. 1952 age 50

   CreditViva Zapata!screenwriter

5. 1968 age 66

   Died

• DZDarryl F. Zanuck2 titles
• MBMarlon Brando1 title
• JQJohn Qualen1 title
• GLGeorge J. Lewis1 title
• BHBen Hecht1 title
• JSJo Swerling1 title
• JDJane Darwell1 title
• WBWard Bond1 title
• MAMary Anderson1 title
• IBIrving Bacon1 title

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  Photo:McFadden Publications, Inc.; no photographer credited; photo likely the work of Sonya Noskowiak, as Steinbeck is wearing the same clothes from her 1935 studio session that produced the work shown here: https://www.si.edu/object/npg_NPG.2006.74Public domain

• We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say — and to feel — "Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought."

  John Steinbeck, CC BY-SA 4.0

• The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

  John Steinbeck, CC BY-SA 4.0

• Out of a thousand centuries they drew the ancient admiration of the footman for the horseman. They knew instinctively that a man on a horse is spiritually as well as physically bigger than a man on foot.

  John Steinbeck, CC BY-SA 4.0

• In every bit of honest writing in the world ... there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love. There are shorter means, many of them. There is writing promoting social change, writing punishing injustice, writing in celebration of heroism, but always that base theme. Try to understand each other.

  John Steinbeck, CC BY-SA 4.0

• I must go over into the interior valleys. ... There are five thousand families starving to death over there, not just hungry but actually starving. The government is trying to feed them and get medical attention to them, with the Fascist group of utilities and banks and huge growers sabotaging the thing all along the line, and yelling for a balanced budget. In one tent there were twenty people quarantined for small pox and two of the women are to have babies in that tent this week. I've tied into the thing from the first and I must get down there and see it and see if I can do something to knock these murderers on the heads. <br> Do you know what they're afraid of? They think that if these people are allowed to live in camps with proper sanitary facilities they will organize, and that is the bugbear of the large landowner and the corporate farmer. The states and counties will give them nothing because they are outsiders. But the crops of any part of this state could not be harvested wi

  John Steinbeck, CC BY-SA 4.0

• You see this book is finished and it is a bad book and I must get rid of it. It can't be printed. It is bad because it isn't honest. Oh! the incidents all happened but — I'm not telling as much of the truth about them as I know. In satire you have to restrict the picture and I just can't do satire. I've written three books now that were dishonest because they were less than the best that I could do. One you never saw because I burned it the day I finished it. ... My whole work drive has been aimed at making people understand each other and then I deliberately write this book, the aim of which is to cause hatred through partial understanding. My father would have called it a smart-alec book. It was full of tricks to make people ridiculous. If I can't do better I have slipped badly. And that I won't admit — yet.

  John Steinbeck, CC BY-SA 4.0