Search results for ""author john steinbeck""

John Steinbeck was never content to repeat himself, and his restless search for new forms and fresh subject matter is fully evident in the books of his later years. This volume collects four novels that exhibit the full range of his gift, along with a travel book that has become one of his most enduringly popular works.In The Wayward Bus (1947), Steinbeck leads a group of ill-matched passengers representing a spectrum of social types and classes, stranded by a washed-out bridge, on a circuitous journey that exposes cruelties, self-deceptions, and unsuspected moral strengths. The tone ranges from boisterous comedy to trenchant satirical observation of postwar America. Burning Bright (1950), an allegory set against shifting backgrounds (circus, sea, farm) and revolving around the fear of sterility and the desire for self-perpetuation, marks Steinbeck’s involvement with the drama in its fusion of the forms of novel and play.Sweet Thursday (1954) marks Steinbeck’s return, in a mood of sometimes frothy comedy, to the characters and milieu of his earlier Cannery Row. A love story set against the background of the local brothel, the Bear Flag, Sweet Thursday is for all its intimations of melancholy one of the most lighthearted of Steinbeck’s books. It was subsequently adapted by Rodgers and Hammerstein into their musical Pipe Dream. Steinbeck’s final novel, The Winter of Our Discontent (1961) is set in an old Long Island whaling town modeled on Sag Harbor, where he had been spending time since 1953. The book breaks new ground in its depiction of the crass commercialism of contemporary America, and its impact on a protagonist with traditionalist values who is appalled but finally tempted by the encroaching sleaziness.Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962) was Steinbeck’s last published book. A record of his experiences and observations as he drove around America in a pickup truck, accompanied by his standard poodle Charley, it is filled with engaging, often humorous description and comes to a powerful climax in an encounter with racist demonstrators in New Orleans.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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A Penguin ClassicWritten at a time of profound anxiety caused by the illness of his mother, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck draws on his memories of childhood in these stories about a boy who embodies both the rebellious spirit and the contradictory desire for acceptance of early adolescence. Unlike most coming-of-age stories, the cycle does not end with a hero “matured” by circumstances. As John Seelye writes in his introduction, reversing common interpretations, The Red Pony is imbued with a sense of loss. Jody’s encounters with birth and death express a common theme in Steinbeck’s fiction: They are parts of the ongoing process of life, “resolving” nothing. The Red Pony was central not only to Steinbeck’s emergence as a major American novelist but to the shaping of a distinctly mid twentieth-century genre, opening up a new range of possibilities about the fictional presence of a child’s world. This edition contains an introduction by John Seelye.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

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Selected by NYU as one of the century's best books of American journalism.Gathered in this volume are seven long-form articles that John Steinbeck wrote in 1936 for The San Francisco News about the plight of migrant farmworkers during the Dust Bowl, accompanied by photographs by Dorothea Lange and others. Steinbeck toured the squatters' camps and Hoovervilles of California, creating unforgettable portraits of once strong, independent farmers reduced to misery. The inquisitiveness and outrage of an investigative reporter combined with the expressive powers of a novelist in his prime fueled The Harvest Gypsies, which in turn furnished the factual and emotional roots for The Grapes of Wrath and has long been hailed as an American classic in its own right.

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The Hayashi Steinbeck Bibliography is the third volume in Scarecrow's popular series that gathers citations about the life and work of the influential American author John Steinbeck. This volume, covering the period from 1982 through 1996, was compiled by noted Steinbeck scholar and historian Michael J. Meyer; for the first time in this series, it includes citations for works published in languages other than English and provides English translations of their titles for quick assessment of their scholarly value. This volume includes over 4000 citations (compared to 2500 for the previous volume), as well as 15 major new critical studies and 2 new biographies. The thorough index not only lists the author's works, but also major characters, themes, and stylistic tendencies, and extensive cross-references make this volume easy to use for not only college professors and scholars but also high school and college students who are only beginning to develop a familiarity with Steinbeck's work. Finally, The Hayashi Steinbeck Bibliography presents corrections and addenda to the two previous volumes (now out of print), making the three volumes together one of the most complete sources of work on John Steinbeck ever printed.

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