In every bit of honest writing in the world…there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love.

American writer John Steinbeck, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, whose protest novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) offered hope in the face of the dispossession of the Great Depression, died this day in 1968.