John Steinbeck

Novels and Stories 1932–1937

The Pastures of Heaven (stories) • To a God Unknown • Tortilla Flat • In Dubious Battle • Of Mice and Men

John Steinbeck, from the very start of his career, evoked the landscape and people of central California with lyrical intensity and unflinching frankness. The Library of America presents for the first time in one volume Steinbeck's early writings, which expressed his abiding concerns for community, social justice, and the elemental connection between nature and human society. In prose that blends the vernacular and the incantatory, the local and the mythic, these five works chart Steinbeck's evolution into one of the greatest and most enduring popular of American novelists.

The Pastures of Heaven (1932), a collection of interrelated stories, delineates the troubled inner lives and sometimes disastrous fates of families living in a seemingly tranquil California valley. The surface realism of Steinbeck's first mature work is enriched by hints of uncanny forces at work beneath.

"Deep down it's mine, right to the center of the world," says Salinas Valley farmer Joseph Wayne about his land in John Steinbeck's To a God Unknown (1933). A sense of primeval magic dominates the novel as the farmer reverts to pagan nature worship and begins a tortuous journey toward catastrophe and ultimate understanding.

Steinbeck's sympathetic depiction of the raffish paisons of Tortilla Flat (1935), a ramshackle district above Monterey, first won him popular attention. The Flat's tenderhearted, resourceful, mildly corrupt, over-optimistic characters are a triumph of life-affirming humor.

In Dubious Battle (1936) plunges into the political struggle of the 1930s and paints a vigorous fresco of a migrant fruit-pickers' strike. Anticipating the collective portraiture of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck poignantly traces the surges and shifts of group behavior.

With Of Mice and Men (1937), Steinbeck secured his status as one of the most influential American writers. Lennie and George, itinerant farmhands held together in the face of deprivation only by the frailest of dreams, have long since passed into American mythology. This novel, which Steinbeck called "such a simple little thing," is now recognized as a masterpiece of concentrated emotional power.

The editors of this volume are Robert DeMott and Elaine A. Steinbeck (1914–2003). Robert DeMott is the Edwin and Ruth Kennedy Distinguished Professor at Ohio University and the author of Steinbeck's Typewriter, an award-winning book of critical essays. Elaine A. Steinbeck, co-editor of Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, was married to John Steinbeck from 1950 until his death in 1968.

Other volumes in the Library of America's edition of John Steinbeck's collected works:
The Grapes of Wrath and Other Writings 1936–1941
Novels 1942–1952
Travels with Charley and Later Novels 1947–1962

Save $35 when you buy all four volumes

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