September 14 - John Steinbeck Receives the Medal of Freedom

This Day in History: 14 September 2020

 

14 September 1964

 

56 years ago, today, writer John Steinbeck was awarded the Medal of Freedom. This award recognises people who have made special contributions to the security or national interests of the United States. He had already received numerous other honours and awards for his work in writing, including the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature and a Pulitzer Prize in 1939 for 'Grapes of Wrath'. Given this award by President Lyndon B. Johnson, he remarked that Steinbeck was a writer of "worldwide influence", as he had "helped America to understand herself by finding universal themes in the experience of men and women everywhere".

Steinbeck had studied writing at Stanford between 1920 and 1925 but never graduated. He later moved to New York and became a manual labourer and journalist as he wrote his first two novels, which were not well-received. His next works, 'In Dubious Battle' and 'Of Mice and Men' were both very successful, however, and in 1938, his masterpiece 'The Grapes of Wrath' was published. After the Second World War, Steinbeck's work became more sentimental, and he also began to write many successful films, such as 'Forgotten Village'. In 1968, after winning the Nobel Prize six years earlier, Steinbeck died in New York of heart disease and congestive heart failure.

Want to find out more about the life and death of John Steinbeck? Click here for more information, or here for more about the history of the Medal of Freedom.