No Wrath, but Some Discontent, When Nobel Prize Was Awarded to Steinbeck

nobelprize.org John Steinbeck

When their best-laid schemes of mice and men, and authors and writing, went awry, the members of the Swedish Academy made the best of what they thought was a bad situation in 1962: they awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to John Steinbeck. The decision came amid their general dissatisfaction with the candidates for the prize that year, according to documents recently released by the academy.

As has become its custom, after a 50-year waiting period the Swedish Academy released documents on the internal deliberation of its committee members as well as a privately kept shortl ist for the literary prize, The Guardian said, citing a report in the Svenska Dagbladet of Stockholm.

According to The Guardian, 66 authors were put forward for the literature Nobel in 1962, and the list was narrowed down to Steinbeck, Robert Graves, Lawrence Durrell, Karen Blixen and Jean Anouilh. But after looking at the field of contenders a committee member, Henry Olsson, wrote, “There aren't any obvious candidates for the Nobel prize and the prize committee is in an unenviable situation.”

Blixen, the Danish author who wrote “Out of Africa” under the pen name Isak Dinesen, became ineligible when she died in September 1962. Graves, whose novels included “I, Claudius,” was nonetheless regarded primarily as a poet and Olsson, The Guardian said, was reluctant to give the prize to an Anglo-Saxon poet until Ezra Pound, whose work he greatly admired, died. (Although Olsson objected to Pound's politics.) Durrell's series of novels “The Alexandria Quartet” was not yet considered a significantly substantial body of work (the author had also been passed over in 1961), while Anouilh, the French dramatist, had the bad fortune to come between the 1960 Nobel victory of his countryman Saint-John Perse and the ascent of Jean-Paul Sartre, who would win in 1964.

So the prize was given to Steinbeck, whose body of work consisted merely of such enduring novels as “Of Mice and Men,” “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Cannery Row” and “East of Eden.” In awarding the Nobel to Steinbeck, the Swedish Academy offered no public hint of its internal weariness, citing him for being among “ the masters of modern American literature” and “for his realistic as well as imaginative writings, distinguished by a sympathetic humor and a keen social perception.”