This was on an afternoon in October almost 40 years ago. John Steinbeck had just won the 1962 Nobel Prize in literature. I was a young reporter, sent to a press conference at his publisher's office. The conference room was packed. Here came Steinbeck, then 60 years old, to sit at a large table crowded with microphones. It was the only time I ever saw him, and all I can remember now is the wounded look in his eyes.

The reason for the look was simple. At some point near the end of the brief event, one of the 70-odd reporters asked Steinbeck whether he thought he deserved the Nobel Prize. It was a spear of a question. Steinbeck paused for a long moment.

"Frankly, no," said the author of "The Grapes of Wrath," and the look washed across his face and remained in his eyes. Soon he got up, left with his wife, and the process of dishonoring the man as a writer was underway.

How They Sneered

In the days that followed (during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis), Steinbeck's choice by the Swedish Academy was greeted in his own country with near-unanimous snarls of contempt from the literary critics.

John Steinbeck? They hissed and moaned and made ferrety remarks. Or they laughed out loud. Even The New York Times weighed in with an editorial suggesting that the choice demeaned the prize, that Steinbeck, at 60, was a writer whose best work was behind him.

"This prize is a monster in some ways," he wrote to a friend. "I have always been afraid of it." He wrote another correspondent: "We've survived poverty and pain and loss. Now let's see if we can survive this."

In the end, Steinbeck's work handled it for him, surviving the nastiest criticism.

Today, during the celebration of the 100th anniversary of Steinbeck's birth, nobody remembers the names of those critics. But Steinbeck is still very much an icon of American literature — and on March 19 he will be honored by the likes of William Kennedy, Peter Matthiessen, Arthur Miller, George Plimpton and Studs Terkel at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall.

Steinbeck's sturdy, often lyrical fictions remain triumphantly in print all over the world, selling more than 700,000 copies a year. His 1939 masterpiece, "The Grapes of Wrath," has been read by millions of Americans. Each year, hundreds drive west on Route 66, retracing the fictional exodus of the Joads and Jim Casy and Rose of Sharon. Those characters were the inventions of John Steinbeck. He put them into the American imagination. They have never left.

Strong Irish Strain

Steinbeck was born in a large Victorian house in Salinas, Calif., on Feb 27, 1902. His father, John Ernst Steinbeck, of German descent, was a soft-spoken businessman who served as Monterey County treasurer. His mother, Olive Hamilton, was descended from an Irish Protestant family that prospered for two centuries near County Ballykelly, Londonderry. Her father, Sam Hamilton, emigrated around 1850 and found his way to California.

"I am half-Irish, the rest of my blood being watered down with German and Massachusetts English," Steinbeck once said. "But Irish blood doesn't water down very well. The strain must be very strong."

Olive was a schoolteacher, with the inherited Ulster virtues of tenacity and discipline, and she taught young John the arts of reading and writing. At 14, he decided that he wanted to be a writer.

"In my struggle, it was he [his father] who supported and backed me — not my mother," Steinbeck later explained. "She desperately wanted me to be something decent, like a banker. But my father wanted me to be myself. Isn't that odd?"

Although the family was safely middle-class, every summer John did manual labor on roads and ranches. But he was not much of a student. Stanford University clearly bored him, and in 1925 he walked away without a degree. It was time to head east. He saved some money, took passage on a ship called the Katrina through the Panama Canal to Havana (where he blew most of his money on a young woman) and finally reached New York.

"From a porthole," he wrote later, "I saw the city, and it horrified me. There was something monstrous about it — the tall buildings looming to the sky and the lights shining through the falling snow. I crept ashore — frightened and cold and with a touch of panic in my stomach."

Manual Labor

Steinbeck had $3 in his pocket, but his married sister Beth was living in the city and her husband loaned him $30. He found a room on Fort Greene Place in Brooklyn and a job as a dollar-a-day laborer. Working with many black New Yorkers wheeling cement, John Steinbeck helped build Madison Square Garden on Eighth Ave. and 50th St. He knew what it was to fall into bed in a state of exhaustion.

Then one of the Hamilton clan, an uncle from Chicago, arrived on a visit and with a few phone calls landed Steinbeck a job as a $25-a-week reporter on Hearst's New York American. By his own admission, he wasn't much of a reporter.

"They gave me stories to cover in Queens and Brooklyn," he later wrote, "and I would get lost and spend hours trying to find my way back."

Still, he was becoming a writer, learning much craft from older reporters, acquiring tools for seeing and listening to the world. He moved to a fleabag hotel near Gramercy Park. Then, within two days, his girlfriend gave up on him and he was fired from the American. A Stanford friend told him about a job on a ship bound for San Francisco. He took it.

Back in California, working at odd jobs to support himself, he finally started writing fiction. His first novel was "Cup of Gold" (1929), about the pirate Henry Morgan, a period swashbuckler that almost instantly vanished (although he did use his experiences of Panama and Havana in its pages). He had no better luck with his next two books: "The Pastures of Heaven" and "To a God Unknown." He had received for these books a total advance of $400; they did not earn back the advance.

Meanwhile, he had married Carol Henning, the first of his three wives, and moved to Pacific Grove, where they lived on a budget of $50 a month. In 1935, everything changed when he published a short, charming novel called "Tortilla Flat." It was a hit, and bought by the movies for $4,000.

This modest success did not make Steinbeck happy. In a letter to his agent, he admitted: "I'm scared to death of popularity. It has ruined everyone I know."

Mother Earth

Within a few years, Steinbeck had found his basic subject: the Ruined Eden. All of his work contains mutilated landscapes, green valleys turned black, rivers choked by the works of men. His reporter's eye was supported by a Celtic sense of the abiding holiness of the earth. He became the novelist of the American version of what Irish rebel Wolfe Tone called "the men of no property." All came together in "The Grapes of Wrath."

In his best work, Steinbeck gave voice to those without voices. He knew how to enter the lives of people who were not like him: Mexicans, above all, in "Tortilla Flat," "The Pearl," a number of short stories, the screenplay for "Viva Zapata!" — but also the dirt farmers, whores, union organizers and outcasts who lived in "Of Mice and Men."

In 1950, he moved back to New York, the city that had beat the pants off him when he was young and obscure, and stayed here (with a second house in Sag Harbor, L.I.) for the rest of his life. He was happy with his third wife, Elaine. He liked working on carpentry and furniture. He wrote with sharpened black pencils on yellow pads. He worried about his children, his work, his country. He lived an honorable life, and died in 1968.

Did he deserve the Nobel Prize? Of course he did. The evidence of his value remains available in the libraries and bookstores of the world.

A belated happy birthday, old writer, old New Yorker. I'll never forget your wounded eyes.

The Steinbeck Bibliography

* "Cup of Gold" 1929
* "The Pastures of Heaven" 1932
* "To a God Unknown" 1933
* "Tortilla Flat" 1935
* "In Dubious Battle" 1936
* "Of Mice and Men" 1937
* "The Red Pony" 1937
* "Of Mice and Men" (play) 1937
* "The Long Valley" (short stories) 1938
* "The Grapes of Wrath" 1939
* "The Forgotten Village" 1941
* "Sea of Cortez" (journal) 1941
* "The Moon Is Down" 1942
* "Bombs Away" (essay) 1942
* "The Moon Is Down" (play) 1942
* "The Portable Steinbeck" 1943
* "Cannery Row" 1945
* "The Pearl" 1947
* "The Wayward Bus" 1947
* "A Russian Journal" 1948
* "Burning Bright" (play) 1950
* "The Log From the Sea of Cortez" 1951
* "East of Eden" 1952
* "Sweet Thursday" 1954
* "Pipe Dream" (play) 1956
* "A Short Reign of Pippin IV" 1957
* "Once There Was a War" (dispatches) 1958
* "The Winter of Our Discontent" 1961
* "Travels With Charley" (journal) 1962
* "America and Americans" 1966


Posthumous Publications

* "Journal of a Novel" 1969
* "A Life in Letters" 1975
* "Viva Zapata!" 1975
* "Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights" 1976
* "Letters to Elizabeth" 1978
* "Uncollected Stories of John Steinbeck" 1986
* "Selected Essays of John Steinbeck" 1988
* "The Harvest Gypsies" 1988


Selected Movies

* The Pearl" 2001: Ryan James, Lukas Haas, Richard Harris
* "Of Mice and Men" 1992: John Malkovich, Gary Sinise
* "Cannery Row" 1982: Nick Nolte, Debra Winger
* "The Wayward Bus" 1957: Joan Collins, Jayne Mansfield, Dan Dailey
* "East of Eden" 1955: James Dean, Julie Harris
* "Viva Zapata!" 1952: Marlon Brando, Anthony Quinn
* "The Red Pony" 1949: Myrna Loy, Robert Mitchum
* "Lifeboat" 1944: Tallulah Bankhead, William Bendix
* "The Moon Is Down" 1943: Cedric Hardwick, Lee J. Cobb
* "Tortilla Flat" 1942: Spencer Tracy, Hedy Lamarr, John Garfield
* "The Grapes of Wrath" 1940: Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, John Carradine
* "Of Mice and Men" 1939: Burgess Meredith, Lon Chaney