When he turned on the TV set to catch the latest Cuba bulletins before breakfast one morning last week, John Ernst Steinbeck had no inkling that he had won this year's Nobel Prize for Literature while he slept. At a press conference a few hours later, ruddy-faced, jug-eared and bearded, John Steinbeck muttered that he "got splintered this morning" and still felt "wrapped and shellacked." Later, with tongue in cheek, he explained that wrapping and shellacking is the standard formula for repairing a cracked goldfish bowl.
The award took another kind of shellacking...
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