Happy Birthday to John Steinbeck a giant of American Literature
February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968
1962 Nobel Prize in Literature: Awarded « for his realistic and imaginative writings, which combine sympathetic humor with keen social perception. »
The Grapes of Wrath
Winner of The Pulitzer Prize in 1939 is considered John Steinbeck’s masterpiece and part of the American literary canon.
Tortilla Flat
Steinbeck’s initial commercial success, an episodic fiction, narrates the experiences of a group of disreputable residents in a rundown coastal area of California.
Of Mice and Men
A 1937 novel about ranch workers George and Lennie, striving to buy their own farm. It delves into The Great Depression and explores themes of racism, loneliness, mental illness, and the quest for independence.
Cannery Row
The 1945 novel follows a marine biologist in a shabby district of Monterey, California, where sardine canneries abound, and he is celebrated by his colorful neighbors for his kindness. This is our favorite John Steinbeck for the humorous characters and comments and wonderful descriptions. So good I read it through twice back to back – I’ve never done that before. The interspersal of vignette chapters is also a treat. How can you go wrong with a book that is introduced by the author like this:
“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitant are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holymen” and he would have meant the same thing. … How can the poem and the stink and the grating noises– the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream — be set down alive? When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book — to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves.”
East of Eden
In his 1952 novel set in the Salinas Valley, Steinbeck examines the themes of good and evil through the narrative of two families: the Hamiltons – inspired by Steinbeck’s maternal lineage – and the Trasks, drawing parallels to the biblical account of Adam and his descendants. The story also reflects elements of his paternal heritage.
The Pearl
A novella follows a pearl diver, Kino, and explores man’s purpose as well as greed, defiance of societal norms, and evil. Steinbeck’s inspiration was a Mexican folk tale from La Paz, Baja California Sur, which he had heard in a visit to the formerly pearl-rich region in 1940.
Read more about John Steinbeck.
All of these titles are available currently in Bill and Rosa’s Book Room including a 1945 first edition of Cannery Row.
