California fiction may not enjoy the cachet of Southern literature, but no American author got as much national attention this year as John Steinbeck. The centennial of his birth spurred hundreds of events, from a tribute at New York’s Lincoln Center to book discussions in Galesburg, Ill., and film screenings in Smyrna, Tenn.—plus a full calendar in his hometown haunts of Salinas and Monterey. The California Council for the Humanities launched its campaign, “California Reads The Grapes of Wrath,” in October. Says Bill Deverell, ’83, council chair and an associate history professor at Caltech, Steinbeck’s 1939 masterpiece is not only a great American novel, but perhaps “the great California novel.”
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