John Steinbeck with "Tortilla Flat" (1935), a novel set in post-war Monterey, California, that won the California Commonwealth Club's Gold Medal. It portrays the adventures of a group of classless and usually homeless young men in Monterey after World War I, just before U.S. prohibition. They are portrayed in ironic comparison to mythic knights on a quest and reject nearly all the standard mores of American society in enjoyment of a dissolute life devoted to wine, lust, camaraderie and petty theft. In presenting the 1962 Nobel Prize to Steinbeck, the Swedish Academy cited "spicy and comic tales about a gang of "paisanos",
John Ross (author) John Ross (author) John Franklin Ross (born June 17, 1957) is an American gun rights activist, author of the underground bestselling novel "Unintended Consequences", author of a regular column on the Internet, and was the Democratic candidate for U.S. Congress in 1998 in Missouri's 2nd congressional district. "Unintended Consequences" is a controversial novel that mixes real events with fiction. These events portray a continuing oppression of the American gun culture that, the author believes, has occurred since the passage of the National Firearms Act of 1934, which made it a federal offense to possess a machine gun, short-barreled rifle, short-barreled