He married his third wife, Elaine Scott, in late 1950 and they lived together until his death. Although his most notable award was the Nobel Prize for Literature in December 1962, his work was recognized in many other ways. Several of his novels reached a large popular audience when they were chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club; his critical success peaked when
The Grapes of Wrath won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940. His first two plays,
Of Mice and Men and
The Moon is Down (1942), were included in the Burns Mantle
Best Plays Yearbook. The first play won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for the 1937-1938 season and the second play won the King Haakon Liberty Cross, a Norwegian award, in 1946. Both plays appeared in film versions. During the 1940s Steinbeck also wrote several original screenplays. He died of a heart attack in New York City at the age of sixty-six; his ashes were buried in Salinas, California.
Some of Steinbeck's major themes and techniques are reflected in the three stories he dramatized for the stage. In discussing his attitude toward form, he remarked in Saturday Review , "If a writer likes to write, he will find satisfaction in endless experiment with his medium.
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