“Everybody wants a little bit of land, not much. Jus’ som’thin’ that was his. Som’thin’ he could live on and there couldn’t nobody throw him off of it.”
― John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
• Biography - National Steinbeck Center
• Biography - Gale in Context (Log in with RAIL card)
• New York Times Topics - John Steinbeck
• Video: John Steinbeck Mini Bio
• Video: Steinbeck's Nobel Prize Ceremony
John Steinbeck stands as one of the most popular and widely read novelists in America. The winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, he wrote such classics as The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, The Red Pony, and East of Eden. Literary scholar Harold Bloom introduces this collection of new critical essays about this acclaimed author.
A unique insight into the life of John Steinbeck that details his incredible hunger for telling stories, his experience with the Great Depression, and the works that shaped him.
The biography of the great novelist who immortalized the common people of the Great Depression and some coastal towns in California.
A collection of Steinbeck's work containing: Of Mice and Men; The Red Pony; The Long Valley, The Pastures of Heaven, Tortilla Flat, Indubious Battle, The Grapes of Wrath, Sea of Cortez, Cannery Row, The Winter of Our Discontent, and other selections.
An unlikely pair, George and Lennie, two migrant workers in California during the Great Depression, grasp for their American Dream. 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 land jobs on a ranch in the Salinas Valley, the fulfillment of their dream seems to be within their grasp. The pair seems unstoppable until tragedy strikes and their hopes come crashing down.
Adopting the structure and themes of the Arthurian legend, John Steinbeck created a “Camelot” on a shabby hillside above the town of Monterey, California, and peopled it with a colorful band of knights. At the center of the tale is Danny, whose house, like Arthur’s castle, becomes a gathering place for men looking for adventure, camaraderie, and a sense of belonging—men who fiercely resist the corrupting tide of honest toil and civil rectitude.
Forced from their home, the Joad family is lured to California to find work; instead they find disillusionment, exploitation, and hunger.
John Steinbeck said his aim in writing The Grapes of Wrath was to expose those responsible for the depression while revealing the true plight of the workers who remained constant victims of greed. This incisive volume explores issues such as the need to protect migrant workers' rights, the exploitation of workers, how industrialism dehumanizes workers, how the novel changed perceptions of the homeless, and the need to protect the modern family farm from industrialism.
Written at a time of profound anxiety caused by the illness of his mother, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck draws on his memories of childhood in these stories about a boy who embodies both the rebellious spirit and the contradictory desire for acceptance of early adolescence.
Cannery Row focuses on the acceptance of life as it is--both the exuberance of community and the loneliness of the individual. John Steinbeck draws on his memories of the real inhabitants of Monterey, California, and interweaves their stories in this world where only the fittest survive--creating what is at once one of his most humorous and poignant works.
Set in the rich farmland of California's Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel 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. The masterpiece of Steinbeck's later years, East of Eden is a work in which Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love's absence.
John Steinbeck set out, at the age of fifty-eight, to rediscover the country he had been writing about for so many years. With Charley, his French poodle, Steinbeck drives the interstates and the country roads, dines with truckers, encounters bears at Yellowstone and old friends in San Francisco. Along the way he reflects on the American character, racial hostility, the particular form of American loneliness he finds almost everywhere, and the unexpected kindness of strangers.