John Steinbeck banned the book from the county's publicly funded schools and libraries. It was burned in Salinas on two different occasions. In 2003, a school board in Mississippi banned it on the grounds of profanity. According to the American Library Association Steinbeck was one of the ten most frequently banned authors from 1990 to 2004, with "Of Mice and Men" ranking sixth out of 100 such books in the United States. The award of the 1962 Nobel Prize for Literature to Steinbeck was controversial in the United States. The award citation lauded Steinbeck "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as
John Steinbeck they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception". Many critics complained that the author's best works were behind him. "The New York Times" ran an article by Arthur Mizener titled "Does a Writer with a Moral Vision of the 1930s Deserve the Nobel Prize?" that claimed Steinbeck was undeserving of the prestigious prize as he was a "limited talent" whose works were "watered down by tenth-rate philosophizing". Many American critics now consider these attacks to be politically motivated. The British newspaper "The Guardian", in a 2013 article that revealed that Steinbeck had been a compromise choice for the Nobel Prize,