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...

"For the diver Kino, finding a magnificent pearl means the promise of better life for his impoverished family. His dream blinds him to the greed and suspicions the pearl arouses in him and his neighbors, and even his loving wife cannot temper his obsession or stem the events leading to tragedy. Kino and his wife illustrate the fall from innocence of people who believe that wealth erases all problems"--Page 4 of cover.

Penguin Classics commemorates the 50th anniversary of Steinbeck's Nobel Prize with two stunning new editions of his best-loved worksAt age fifty-eight, John Steinbeck and his poodle, Charley, embarked on a journey across America. This chronicle of their trip meanders from small towns to growing cities to glorious wilderness oases. Still evocative and awe-inspiring after fifty years, Travels with Charley in Search of America provides an intimate look...

This exciting day-by-day account of Steinbeck's trip to the Gulf of California with biologist Ed Ricketts, drawn from the longer Sea of Cortez, is a wonderful combination of science, philosophy, and high-spirited adventure. Annotation. In 1940, Steinbeck and his friend, biologist Ed Ricketts, ventured into the Gulf of California to search for marine invertebrates along the beaches. This exciting, day-by-day account of their trip, drawn from the longer...

From the Publisher: This second volume in The Library of America's authoritative edition of John Steinbeck features his acknowledged masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath. Written in an incredibly compressed five-month period, the novel had an electrifying impact upon publication in 1939, unleashing a political storm with its vision of America's dispossessed struggling for survival. It continues to exert a powerful influence on American culture, and has...

The saga of three generations of the Trask and Hamilton families in the early 1900's in Northern California. East of Eden is a work in which Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love's absence. Adapted for the 1955 film directed by Elia Kazan introducing James Dean and read by thousands as the book that brought...

In Monterey, on the California coast, Sweet Thursday is what they call the day after Lousy Wednesday, which is one of those days that are just naturally bad. Returning to the scene of Cannery Row, the weedy lots and junk heaps and flophouses of Monterey, John Steinbeck once more brings to life the denizens of a netherworld of laughter and tears, from Fauna, new headmistress of the local brothel, to Hazel, a bum whose mother must have wanted a daughter....

This collection of stories takes its name from California's Salinas Valley, the setting of much of Steinbeck's work.