The result of a worldwide effort to assess both the current state of critical understanding of John Steinbeck’s works and the extent of his cultural influenceAs a writer who, beginning in the 1930s, illuminated the lives of ordinary people, Steinbeck came to be the conscience of America. He witnessed and recorded with clarity much of the political and social upheaval of the 20th century: The Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, and Vietnam. Yet hi...

The last of John Steinbeck’s play-novelettes, Burning Bright was the author’s final attempt after 1937’s Of Mice and Men and 1942’s The Moon is Down to create what he saw as a new, experimental literary form. Four scenes, four people: the husband who yearns for a son, ignorant of his own sterility; the wife who commits adultery to fulfill her husband’s wish; the father of the child; and the outsider whose actions will affect them all. In t...

"A postwar continuation of Cannery Row, [Sweet Thursday is] every bit as juicy and relaxed as the original. . . . This is comedy--bawdy, sentimental, and good fun.” The AtlanticIn Monterey, on the California coast, Sweet Thursday is what they call the day after Lousy Wednesday, which is one of those days that is 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 de...

Set in familiar Steinbeck territory, To a God Unknown is a mystical tale, exploring one man's attempt to control the forces of nature and, ultimately, to understand the ways of God.

In his first novel to follow the publication of his enormous success, The Grapes of Wrath*,* Steinbeck’s vision comes wonderfully to life in this imaginative and unsentimental 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. This edition features an introduction by Gary Scharnhorst.

The Juvenilia are the early works of Jane Austen, small essays, poems or plays that she compiled in three hand-written notebooks. This edition includes the following works: Frederic & Elfrida Jack & Alice Edgar And Emma: A Tale Henry And Eliza The Adventures Of Mr. Harley Sir William Mountague Memoirs Of Mr. Clifford: An Unfinished Tale The Beautifull Cassandra Amelia Webster The Visit: A Comedy In Two Acts The Mystery: An Unfinished Comedy The Three Sisters ... and many more ...

A collection of original, stimulating interpretations of key texts by Cormac McCarthy, designed for students and edited and written by leading scholars in the field

Reading The Catcher in the Rye has become a rite of passage for young Americans, landing the book on bestseller lists (and banned book lists) each year, even though it was published a half century ago. What is it about J. D. Salinger and his body of work that has left such a lasting mark on American fiction? And who better to answer that question than the current generation of writers?Here are fourteen of the most vital voices in the contemporary American fiction ...

"Fearless, illuminating" criticism from a New York Times–bestselling author and legendary teacher, "proving . . . that true art is moral and not trivial" ( Los Angeles Times).Novelist John Gardner's thesis in On Moral Fiction is simple: "True art is by its nature moral." It is also an audacious statement, as Gardner asserts an inherent value in life and in art. Since the book's first publication, the passion behind Gardner's assertion has...

The Nobel Prizewinning poet and man of letters Octavio Paz was also a brilliant reader of other writers, and this book selects his best critical essays from over three decades. In the sixteen pieces collected here, Paz discusses a wide range of poets and writers, both American and international, from Robert Frost and Walt Whitman to William Carlos Williams; from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Luis Buñuel to Alexander Solzhenitsyn; and from Charles Baudelaire to Jean-Paul Sartre, André Breton, and H...

The purpose of this text is to capture, as far as is possible, the beauty and purpose of the writing in an condensed and readable form. Melville, by his own admission, was torn between what he wanted to write and what he imagined others would wish to read. Much of the plot redundancy, contextual flavor, and extensive history of the whaling industry has been removed. What is left is Melville’s rich allegory and haunting prose, framed by nothing but the elegant plot, presented in a form suit...

In Sentimental Materialism Lori Merish considers the intricate relationship between consumption and womanhood in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Taking as her starting point a diversity of cultural artifacts—from domestic fiction and philosophical treatises to advice literature and cigars—Merish explores the symbolic functions they served and finds that consumption evolved into a form of personal expressiveness that indicated not only a woman’s wealth and taste but a...