In awarding John Steinbeck the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel committee stated that with The Winter of Our Discontent, he had "resumed his position as an independent expounder of the truth, with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American. Ethan Allen Hawley, the novel's protagonist, works as a clerk in a grocery store that his prominent family once owned. Without status in the town, his wife is restless, and his teenage children are hungry for the tantalizing material comforts he cannot provide. Then one day, in a moment of moral crisis, Ethan decides to take a holiday from his own scrupulous standards. In The Winter of Our Discontent, John Steinbeck, perhaps the master writer of the American working class, explores the cultural malaise of the 1960s and its far-ranging implications: social, familial, and personal.