After decades of being dismissed as a sentimental, embarrassingly political writer fit only for junior high school English class, Steinbeck is in our thoughts again --- precisely because he is sentimental, political and easy to read.

Best of all, he's still a troublemaker: OF MICE AND MEN usually ranks second in each year's list of most frequently banned books. The charge: "using offensive language and being unsuited to age group."

Steinbeck would be sad to know his books were kept off any library's shelves --- but he was under no illusions about the role of literature. Books, he knew, are a key weapon in a cultural war that has raged in America for more than a century; he'd be proud that bigots recognized the power of his writing.

Born in Salinas, California, Steinbeck attended local schools and Stanford University, but dropped out to work as a sales clerk, farm laborer and factory worker. He began writing in the 1920s, and had his first novel published on the eve of the Depression.

That economic disaster forced him to look hard at America. But it didn't cause him to change his life. "I had been practicing for the Depression a long time," he later wrote. "I wasn't involved with loss. I didn't have money to lose, but in common with millions I did dislike hunger and cold."

Fortunately, his family owned a tiny cottage in Pacific Grove, where he could live for free. Pacific Grove was on the sea, so food --- the fish he caught with ease --- was cheap. So he kept writing, even though he "couldn't even afford postage on the manuscripts."

He had his first popular success in 1935, with TORTILLA FLAT. The following year, IN DUBIOUS BATTLE signaled his concern for striking workers. 1937 brought OF MICE AND MEN. And to complete this remarkable streak of powerful writing, he published THE GRAPES OF WRATH in 1939. It won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; the film, starring Henry Fonda, became the most graphic popular account of the Okies migration to California.

Steinbeck went on to write other, sweeter books. But his Nobel Prize, awarded in 1962, was clearly for the socially-conscious novels he wrote in the '30s. He used his Acceptance Speech to restate the virtues of his plain-spoken, heartfelt writing. "Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches," he said, in that address.

The best homage to a writer is always his or her own words. Here's a passage from Chapter 25 of GRAPES OF WRATH. If this doesn't get your blood racing, you're never going to love John Steinbeck:

Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates--died of malnutrition--because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.

The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is a failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

   --- Jesse Kornbluth

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