John Steinbeck: Novels and Stories 1932-1937 (Loa #72): The Pastures of Heaven / To a God Unknown / Tortilla Flat / In Dubious Battle / Of Mice and Me - John Steinbeck
Here for the first time in one volume are John Steinbeck's early California writings, including Tortilla Flat, his first popular success, and the extraordinarily powerful Of Mice and Men. Featuring many other great works written by Steinbeck from 1932-37, this volume is the first in a projected multi-volume set. The Library of America presents for the first time in one volume Steinbeck's early writings, which expressed his abiding concerns for community, social justice, and the elemental connection between nature and human society. In prose that blends the vernacular and the incantatory, the local and the mythic, these five works chart Steinbeck's evolution into one of the greatest and most enduring popular of American novelists. The Pastures of Heaven (1932), a collection of interrelated stories, delineates the troubled inner lives and sometimes disastrous fates of families living in a seemingly tranquil California valley. The surface realism of Steinbeck's first mature work is enriched by hints of uncanny forces at work beneath. Deep down it's mine, right to the center of the world, says Salinas Valley farmer Joseph Wayne about his land in John Steinbeck's To a God Unknown (1933). A sense of primeval magic dominates the novel as the farmer reverts to pagan nature worship and begins a tortuous journey toward catastrophe and ultimate understanding. Steinbeck's sympathetic depiction of the raffish paisons of Tortilla Flat (1935), a ramshackle district above Monterey, first won him popular attention. The Flat's tenderhearted, resourceful, mildly corrupt, over-optimistic characters are a triumph of life-affirming humor. In Dubious Battle (1936) plunges into the political struggle of the 1930s and paints a vigorous fresco of a migrant fruit-pickers' strike. Anticipating the collective portraiture of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck poignantly traces the surges and shifts of group behavior. With Of Mice and Men (1937), Steinbeck secured his status as one of the most influential American writers. Lennie and George, itinerant farmhands held together in the face of deprivation only by the frailest of dreams, have long since passed into American mythology. This novel, which Steinbeck called such a simple little thing, is now recognized as a masterpiece of concentrated emotional power. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to prese
John Steinbeck, born in Salinas, California, in 1902, grew up in a fertile agricultural valley, about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast. Both the valley and the coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled
Collected here for the first time in a deluxe paperback volume are six of John Steinbeck's most widely read and beloved novels. From the tale of commitment, loneliness and hope in Of Mice and Men, to the tough yet charming portrait of people on the margins of society in Cannery Row, to The Pearl's e
The only work of fantasy literature by the Nobel Prize winner is presented in this illustrated deluxe edition. Steinbeck embellishes Malory's spare language with a richness of detail that transforms the vision, makes it no one's but Steinbeck's--John Gardner, The New York Times Book Review. Steinbec
The inspiring novels that have left a significant mark on the world of literature and popular culture. Before the novel, the world of books was dominated by scientific tomes, religious tracts and histories of the victorious in war. There had been stories and epic poems from ancient times - Homer's I