Steinbeck's importance, to be sure, stems from much more than his ability to express an ecological perspective in his fiction and essays. He is best known for his narratives about those living outside mainstream America--migrant workers struggling to survive in California in In Dubious Battle (1936) or dust-bowl refugees of Oklahoma escaping to the promise of a better life in The Grapes of Wrath (1939). A few of his novels were made into award-winning plays; Of Mice and Men won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1937. Even more novels and stories were turned into motion pictures; notably, his novel The Pearl (1947) was made into a movie in 1948, and The Grapes of Wrath in 1940.
Apart from his artistic endeavors, Steinbeck was a friend and "unofficial" adviser to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and a close friend of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. While critics were divided on the quality of Steinbeck's later work, he nonetheless received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1962, near the end of his literary career. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Steinbeck pointed out that as a writer he felt bound to expose "our many grievous faults and failures" and to improve upon the "dark and dangerous dreams" behind the failures.
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