John Steinbeck

From the Publisher: From a swashbuckling pirate fantasy to a meditation on American morality-two classic Steinbeck novels make their black spine debuts. In awarding John Steinbeck the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel committee stated that with The Winter of Our Discontent, he had "resumed his position as an independent expounder of the truth, with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American." Ethan Allen Hawley, the protagonist of...

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 Years
First 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...

Steinbeck records his emotions and experiences during a journey of rediscovery in his native land.

Like his father and grandfather before him, Kino is a poor diver, gathering pearls from the gulf beds that once brought great wealth to the Kings of Spain and now provide Kino, Juana, and their infant son with meager subsistence. Then, on a day like any other, Kino emerges from the sea with a pearl as large as a sea gull's egg, as "perfect as the moon." With the pearl comes hope, the promise of comfort and of security.... A story of classic simplicity,...

In the shabby district above Monterey, California, called Tortilla Flat lives a gang whose exploits compare to those of King Arthur's knights.

In "The Short Reign of Pippin IV," John Steinbeck turns the French Revolution upside down as amateur astronomer Pippin Hristal is drafted to rule the unruly French. Steinbeck creates around the infamous Pippin the most hilarious royal court ever: Pippins 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-called egg king...