'Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.' -John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath, for which Steinbeck won both the Pulitzer and the Nobel Prize, deals heavily in bleakness and indignity. However, one of its central themes is the persistence of hope. Suffering and dying for a concept, Steinbeck writes, is the distinctive quality of man, and of nothing else in the entire universe: "When narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back."
