The last of John Steinbeck's play-novelettes and his 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
A Penguin Classic
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 this turn on a medieval morality play, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck casts an unwavering light on these four intertwined lives, revealing in their finely drawn circumstances the universal contours of vulnerability and passion, desperation and desire. This edition features an introduction and notes for further reading by Steinbeck scholar John Ditsky.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
John Steinbeck (1902-1968), born in Salinas, California, 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 in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929).
After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two California books,
The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and
To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later collected in
The Long Valley (1938). Popular success and financial security came only with
Tortilla Flat (1935), stories about Monterey's paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the California laboring class:
In Dubious Battle (1936),
Of Mice and Men (1937), and the book considered by many his finest,
The Grapes of Wrath (1939).
The Grapes of Wrath won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1939.
Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with
The Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious student of marine biology with
Sea of Cortez (1941). He devoted his services to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play-novelette
The Moon is Down (1942).
Cannery Row (1945),
The Wayward Bus (1948), another experimental drama,
Burning Bright (1950), and
The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951) preceded publication of the monumental
East of Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family's history.
The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he traveled widely. Later books include
Sweet Thursday (1954),
The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957),
Once There Was a War (1958),
The Winter of Our Discontent (1961),
Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962),
America and Americans (1966), and the posthumously published
Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969),
Viva Zapata! (1975),
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976), and
Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (1989).
Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, and, in 1964, he was presented with the United States Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Steinbeck died in New York in 1968. Today, more than thirty years after his death, he remains one of America's greatest writers and cultural figures.
John Ditsky (introducer), professor emeritus at the University of Windsor, Ontario, has published four books on Steinbeck.
