Although there have been many books written since the 1900's. One that really stands out and explains what good literature is would be "Mice of Men".
“She’s a good person” or “she is mean” are statements that people make on a day to day basis. Who is to judge what type of person you are? The same thing is true when it comes to literature. No matter what you’re reading you are going to judge the main thing it is talking about. If you’re reading a historical document about the president you may judge whether his decisions where right, wrong, good, or bad. We can all agree that good literature is based on how you connect with the story and what is being said.
In the book "Mice of Men" there are ALOT of good examples but for some reason the one that stuck out the most that we can all relate to that you would not really think of would be at the beginning of the book when Lennie grabs the girls dress. When she screams he gets scared and holds on tighter and won’t let go. You may be wondering why this is a good example, but it is for one reason. We have all been scared and not known what to do so we stay tensed up. If you were falling you would tense up and grab something and hold on for dear life. We need to learn from this mistake because sometimes this is bad especially in Lennie’s situation. When you scare someone they are libel to tense up and maybe try and hit you.
Many books have a big discrepancy on good and bad literature and some worse than others.
In John Stein Beck’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in 1962, he briefly explains what good literature is.
"Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate rime of confusion. My great predecessor, William Faulkner, speaking here, referred to it as a tragedy of universal physical fear so long sustained that there were no longer problems of the spirit so that only the human heart in conflict with itself seemed worth writing about Faulkner more than most men was aware of human strength as well as human weaknesses. He knew that the understanding and the resolution of fear are a large part of the writer’s reason for being. This is not new the ancient commission of the writer has not changed he is charged with exposing our many grievous with faults and failures with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.”
The paragraph above is basically saying that writers have always and will always be responsible for bringing out people’s emotions when they are writing and that the reader should feel how you want them to in your writing. Though even further it states that we should learn from the mistakes of society so that they are not repeated and that you should try and learn from the good that happens in society.
In the book “Mice of Men”, George learned something very important. The importance is that Candy’s dog was really old and useless and that the other guys wanted him to get rid of it. Candy said they could go shoot it and they did. From then on out candy was a slightly different person because he felt like he needed to put his own dog down and it made him feel so much worse having someone else do it. George saw how bad Candy was not doing it so when he had to shoot Lennie he made the decision to do it himself so that lennie wouldn’t have to suffer by maybe getting locked up or beaten. This is an example of what Steinbeck is talking about in his speech.
Steinbeck acceptance speech was very good at telling what good literature is and his book was pretty well at backing up what he said and also giving examples.
