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 Sanford (author) John Sanford (author) John Sanford or John B. Sanford, born Julian Lawrence Shapiro (May 31, 1904 – March 5, 2003), was an American screenwriter and author who wrote 24 books. The "Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature" describes him as, "Perhaps the most outstanding neglected novelist." A one-time member of the Communist Party, after he and his wife Marguerite Roberts refused to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee, they were blacklisted and unable to work in Hollywood for nearly a decade. Sanford wrote half of his books after he was 80. He published a 5-volume autobiography, for which he