The Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression, a book that galvanized—and sometimes outraged—millions of readers.One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 YearsFirst 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 we...

Seventeen hunter-scholars explore the hunting experience and question common negative stereotypesDespite the academy having a reputation for supporting broad and open inquiry in scholarship, some academics have not extended this open-minded support to colleagues' personal pursuits. A variety of scholars enjoy hunting, which has been stereotyped by some as an activity of the unsophisticated. In Hunting and the Ivory Tower, Douglas Higbee and David Bruzina p...

A Penguin ClassicAncient pagan beliefs, the great Greek epics, and the Bible all inform this extraordinary novel by Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck, which occupied him for more than five difficult years. While fulfilling his dead father’s dream of creating a prosperous farm in California, Joseph Wayne comes to believe that a magnificent tree on the farm embodies his father’s spirit. His brothers and their families share in Joseph’s prosperity, and the farm flouri...

A road trip through Steinbeck’s America—revisited, reimagined, and reinterpreted.Steinbeck’s Uneasy America is the first collection of critical scholarship devoted to Travels with Charley in Search of America, John Steinbeck’s best-selling, late-career travel memoir. In 1960, Steinbeck was a renowned man of American letters. Many considered him America’s troubadour of ordinary people, the conscience of the country. But weakened by two sma...

A Penguin ClassicIn Monterey, on the California coast, Sweet Thursday is what they call the day after Lousy Wednesday, which is one of those days that are 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 denizens of a netherworld of laughter and tears—from Doc, based on Steinbeck’s lifelong friend Ed Ricketts, to Fauna, new headmistress of the local brothe...

Conversations with Jim Harrison, Revised and Updated offers a judicious selection of interviews spanning the writing career of Jim Harrison (1937–2016) from its beginnings in the 1960s to the last interview he gave weeks before his death in March 2016. Harrison labeled himself and lived as a “quadra-schizoid” writer. He worked in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and screenwriting, and he published more than forty books that attracted an international following. These interviews supply...

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...

[Steinbecks Typewriter: Essays on His Art] collects several of DeMotts finest essays on Steinbeck... [that are] so carefully revised as to warn other critics seeking their own collected essay volume of the difference between a genuinely lapidary compilation and a kitchen midden. Illustrated with some rare photos, this collection is especially notable...John Ditsky, Choice...Steinbecks Typewriter... stands as the most in-depth treatment of Steinbecks aesthetics, particularly ...

John Steinbeck's powerful evocation of the suffering and hardship caused by the Great Depression, and a panoramic vision of the struggle for the American Dream, The Grapes of Wrath includes a critical introduction by Robert DeMott in Penguin Modern Classics. 'I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied.' Shocking and controversial when it was first published in 1939, Steinbeck's Pulitzer prize-winning epic The Grapes of Wrath remains his undisputed ma...

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 only work of political satire, The Short Reign of Pippin IV, John Steinbeck turns the French Revolution upside down as amateur astronomer Pippin Héristal is drafted to rule the unruly French. Steinbeck creates around the infamous Pippin the most hilarious royal court ever: Pippin’s wife, Queen Marie, who “might have taken her place at the bar of a very good restaurant”; his uncle, a man of dubious virtue; his glamour-struck daughter and her beau, the son of the so-c...

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...