John Steinbeck

In his journal, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck called East of Eden "the first book," and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth. Set in the rich farmland of Californias Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two familiesthe Trasks and the Hamiltonswhose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel....

Taken by surprise, a small coastal town is overrun by an invading army with little resistance. The town is important because it is a port that serves a large coal mine. Colonel Lanser, the head of the invading battalion, along with his staff establishes his HQ in the house of the democratically elected and popular Mayor Orden. As the reality of occupation sinks in and the weather turns bleak, with the snows beginning earlier than usual, the "simple,...

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...

In 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 Fauna, new headmistress of the local brothel, to Hazel, a bum whose mother must have wanted a daughter....

John Ernst Steinbeck (February 27, 1902 - December 20, 1968), born in Salinas, CA, was an American writer who won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social percep

Steinbecks 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 Joadsdriven 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 yet majestic...

For the diver Kino, finding a magnificent pearl means the promise of a better life for his impoverished family. His dreams blind him to the greed that the pearl arouses in him and his neighbors.

In September 1960, at age fifty-eight, the author and his poodle, Charley, 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...

"Devoured by lust and greed, Morgan still had two ambitions; first to possess the mysterious woman known as La Santa Roja, and second, to conquer Panama." *** "Henry Morgan, a son of the Welsh glens, sails for the Indies at 15 where he is enslaved in Barbados before coming the lieutenant governor of Jamaica." *** "Henry Morgan ruled the Spanish Main in the 1670s, ravaging the coasts of Cuba and America and striking terror wherever he went. His lust...