This third volume in The Library of America's authoritative edition of
John Steinbeck's writings shows one of America's most enduring
popular writers continuing restlessly to explore new subject matter and
new approaches to storytelling.
The Moon Is Down (1942), set in an unnamed Scandinavian country
under German occupation, dramatizes the transformation of ordinary life
under totalitarian rule and the underground struggle against the Nazi
invaders.In Cannery Row (1945) Steinbeck paid tribute to his closest
friend, the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, in the central character of
Doc, proprietor of the Western Biological Laboratory and spiritual and
financial mainstay of a cast of philosophical drifters and hangers-on.
The comic and bawdy evocation of the main street of Monterey's
sardine-canning district has made this one of the most popular of all
Steinbeck's novels. Steinbeck's long involvement with Mexican culture is
distilled in The Pearl (1947). Expanding on an anecdote he had heard
about a boy who found a pearl of unusual size, Steinbeck turned it into
an allegory of the corrupting influence of sudden wealth. The Pearl
appears here with the original illustrations by José Clemente Orozco.
Ambitious in scale and original in structure, East of Eden (1952)
recounts the violent and emotionally turbulent history of a Salinas
Valley family through several generations. Drawing on Biblical
parallels, East of Eden is an epic that explores the writer's
deepest and most anguished concerns within a landscape that for him had
mythic resonance.
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization
founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by
publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most
significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than
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