John Steinbeck

First published in 1939, Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads, driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into haves and have nots evolves a drama that is intensely human...

In September 1960, at age fifty-eight, the author and his poodle, Charley, and riding in a three-quarter ton pickup truck named Rocinante, embarked on a journey across America. This chronicle of their trip through almost 40 states, meanders from small towns to growing cities to glorious wilderness oases. Providing an intimate look at one of America's most beloved writers in the later years of his life, this is a self-portrait of a man who never wrote...

Each working day from January 29 to November 1, 1951, John Steinbeck warmed up to the work of writing East of Eden with a letter to the late Pascal Covici, his friend and editor at The Viking Press. It was his way, he said, of 'getting my mental arm in shape to pitch a good game.' Steinbeck's letters were written on the left-hand pages of a notebook in which the facing pages would be filled with the text of East of Eden. They touched on many subjects--story...

From the Publisher: From a swashbuckling pirate fantasy to a meditation on American morality-two classic Steinbeck novels make their black spine debuts. 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 protagonist of...

The ambitions, dreams, failings, and innermost thoughts of a diverse group of passengers are revealed as they travel aboard a bus along the backroads of California.

The Moon is Down chronicles the experiences of fascistic invaders - a thinly veiled reference to Nazis - who have occupied a small coal mining town in Northern Europe. The Moon is Down by John Steinbeck is a relatively unknown piece of literature that was widely circulated by political activists and rebels during many occupations; examples include Nazi-occupied France as well as the Soviet Union amongst a slew of other European nations. The novella...

Set in the California apple country this novel portrays a strike by migrant workers that metamorphoses from principled defiance into blind fanaticism.