In 1962, author John Steinbeck—considered a master of American letters—was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, ‘for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception.’ In his Banquet speech, delivered in Stockholm on 10 December, 1962, Steinbeck celebrated his profession by outlining what he saw as its purpose: to realise and to offset the tendency of mankind to mire in times of fear, and to pursue instead ‘the perfectibility of man’.

Acknowledging the troubled state of the world at the time—deep in the Cold War which posed an existential threat to global peace and stability—Steinbeck’s speech is at once apocalyptic and optimistic in its challenge to writers to reflect both the worst and the best man can be, in a quest to better humanity:

‘Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.

The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species.

Humanity has been passing through a grey and desolate time of confusion. My great predecessor, William Faulkner, speaking here, referred to it as a tragedy of universal fear so long sustained that there were no longer problems of the spirit, so that only the human heart in conflict with itself seemed worth writing about.

Faulkner, more than most men, was aware of human strength as well as of human weakness. He knew that the understanding and the resolution of fear are a large part of the writer’s reason for being.

This is not new. The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.

Furthermore, 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.

In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally-flags of hope and of emulation.’