John Steinbeck

(1902 - 1968)

The same year that he received a Pulitzer Prize, John Steinbeck set sail with his wife, a marine-biologist friend named Edward Ricketts, and a crew on a four-thousand-mile journey around the Gulf of California. He and Ricketts copublished Sea of Cortez in 1941. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, Steinbeck said in his acceptance speech, “The writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat—for courage, compassion, and love.”