John Steinbeck

The story of a farm family's Depression-era journey from the Dustbowl of Oklahoma to the California migrant labor camps in search of a better life.

"At age fifty-eight, John Steinbeck and his poodle, Charley, embarked on a journey across America. This chronicle of their trip meanders from small towns to growing cities to glorious wilderness oases. Still evocative and awe-inspiring after fifty years, Travels with Charley in Search of America provides an intimate look at one of America's most beloved writers in the later years of his life--a self-portrait of a man who never wrote an explicit autobiography....

In Depression-era California, two migrant workers dream of better days on a spread of their own until an act of unintentional violence leads to tragic consequences.

Ethan Allen Hawley, the protagonist of the novel, works as a clerk in a grocery store that his family once owned. With the decline in their status, his wife is restless, and his teenage children are hungry for the tantalizing material comforts he cannot provide. Then one day, in a moment of moral crisis, Ethan decides to take a holiday from his own scrupulous standards.

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 News about these history-making events and the hundreds of thousands...

"In 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 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....

In the California apple country, 900 migratory workers rise up "in dubious battle" against the landowners. The group takes on a life of its own, stronger than its individual members and more frightening. Led by the doomed Jim Nolan, the strike springs from his tragic idealism, from the "courage never to submit or yield."

In Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck?s beautifully rendered depictions of small yet fateful moments that transform ordinary lives, these twelve early stories introduce both the subject and style of artistic expression that recur in the most important works of his career. Each of these self-contained stories is linked to the others by the presence of the Munroes, a family whose misguided behavior and lack of sensitivity precipitate disasters and tragedies....