John Steinbeck
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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...
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"They are an unlikely pair: George is "small and quick and dark of face"; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have formed a "family," clinging together in the face of loneliness and alienation. Laborers in California's dusty vegetable fields, they hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. For George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own. When they...
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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...
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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...
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In Conversations with John Steinbeck Thomas Fensch, collects all of Steinbeck's public interviews and allows him to speak in his own behalf in an illuminating expression of his intentions, goals and achievements.
From the beginnings of his career through his last years, the interviews reveal a fascinating, controversial and captivating personality. In the thirties and forties, he made readers socially aware, and in the years following publication...
7) East of Eden
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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 Hamiltons--whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.
8) The pearl
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“There it lay, the great pearl, perfect as the moon.” One of Steinbeck’s most taught works, The Pearl is the story of the Mexican diver Kino, whose discovery of a magnificent pearl from the Gulf beds means the promise of a 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 Juana cannot temper his obsession or stem the events leading to...
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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 novel, works as a clerk in a grocery store that his family once owned. With the decline in their status, his wife is restless, and his teenage children...
13) Cannery Row
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Vividly depicts the colorful, sometimes disreputable, inhabitants of a run-down area in Monterey, California.
14) The red pony
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Description
From the Publisher: Raised on a ranch in northern California, Jody is well-schooled in the hard work and demands of a rancher's life. He is used to the way of horses, too; but nothing has prepared him for the special connection he will forge with Gabilan, a hot-tempered pony his father gives him. With Billy Buck, the hired hand, Jody tends and trains his horse, restlessly anticipating the moment he will sit high upon Gabilan's saddle. But when Gabilan...
15) The wayward bus
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"Chronicle of a bus traveling California's back roads, transporting the lost and the lonely, the good and the greedy, the stupid and the scheming, the beautiful and the vicious away from their shattered dreams and, possibly, toward the promise of the future."--Page 4 of cover.
17) Tortilla flat
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Danny, a veteran of the First World War, returns to Tortilla Flat to enjoy a carefree, aimless, and amoral life in the coastal town of Monterey, California.
19) The moon is down
Author
Description
A beautiful, provincial Norwegian town is invaded by German soldiers. An act of brutality begins an uncontrollable, unalterable chain of events.
Author
Publisher
Literary Classics of the United States
Pub. Date
c2001
Description
A collection of stories includes "The Moon is down," which details the transformation of ordinary life under Nazi rule in an unnamed Scandinavian country under German occupation, as well as "Cannery Row," "The Pearl," and "East of Eden."