John Steinbeck

This sprawling and often brutal novel, set in the rich farmlands of California's Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families--the Trasks' and the Hamilton's--whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. The story of two brothers, Aron is a clean-cut model student, engaged to be married, the pride of his hardworking father. Cal is a rebellious loner, sternly rejected...

The story of a farm family's Depression-era journey from the Dustbowl of Oklahoma to the California migrant labor camps in search of a better life.

“There it lay, the great pearl, perfect as the moon.”
 
Like his father and grandfather before him, Kino is a poor diver, gathering pearls from the gulf beds that once brought great wealth to the Kings of Spain and now provide Kino, Juana, and their infant son with meager subsistence. Then, on a day like any other, Kino emerges from the sea with a pearl as large as a sea gull's egg, as "perfect as the moon." With the...

Vividly depicts the colorful, sometimes disreputable, inhabitants of a run-down area in Monterey, California.

A collection of newspaper articles about Dust Bowl migrants in California's Central Valley by the author of The Grapes of Wrath, accompanied by photos. Three years before his triumphant novel The Grapes of Wrath-a fictional portrayal of a Depression-era family fleeing Oklahoma during a disastrous period of drought and dust storms-John Steinbeck wrote seven articles for the San Francisco News about these history-making events and the hundreds of thousands...

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...

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.

These 12 short stories set in Steinbeck's birthplace of Salinas Valley California, reflect his persistent themes, including the tension between town and country and the struggle of ordinary people trying to find their way in the world.

From the mid-1650s through the 1660s, Henry Morgan, a pirate and outlaw of legendary viciousness, ruled the Spanish Main. He ravaged the coasts of Cuba and America, striking terror wherever he went. Morgan was obsessive. He had two driving ambitions: to possess the beautiful woman called La Santa Roja and to conquer Panama, the "cup of gold."

This book marks the 50the anniversary of the publication of The Grapes of Wrath. During the creation of the novel, Steinbeck faithfully kept a journal revealing a tale of dramatic proportions--of dogged determination, inspiration and of paranoia, self-doubt, and obstacles. The journals record the conception and genesis of the novel and present a vivid cast of characters who left their mark on the novel: Carol Henning Steinbeck, his wife, editor, typist,...