He has never become accustomed to the tragic miracle of consciousness. Perhaps, as has been suggested, his species is not set, has not jelled, but is still in a state of becoming, bound by his physical memories to a past of struggle and survival, limited in his futures by the uneasiness of thought and consciousness."
The "tragic miracle of consciousness" is, for Steinbeck, man's greatest burden and his greatest glory. And the way in which Steinbeck portrays this burden and this glory in his novels and short stories is the source of his greatest strength as a writer. It accounts for the feeling, the passion in his fiction, as well as that feeling's extreme--sentimentality. It was his most important thematic concern, from his depiction of Henry Morgan's drive for power and wealth in Cup of Gold to the concluding statement in his Nobel Prize speech in which he paraphrased John the Apostle by noting that "in the end is the Word, and the Word is Man, and the Word is with Man."
Steinbeck was born and grew up in that long, narrow strip of agricultural land called the Salinas Valley, which is bordered on the east by the Gabilon Mountains, on the west by the Santa Lucia range, and then Monterey Bay.
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