4 Pocket Books of John Steinbeck at the Living with Nature Center

Revival of the Fine Art of Literary Writing  

4 Pocket Books of John Steinbeck at the Living with Nature Center

San Vicente, Ilocos Sur

John Ernst Steinbeck (1902-1968) was an American writer. He won the 1962 Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize in Literature "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception". He has been called "a giant of American letters." 

Dr Abe V Rotor

Today brings to mind scenarios in Steinbeck's time - Dust Bowl and Great Depression - how people suffered to the brink of hopelessness, and how man and his society were able to overcome this crises that engulphed America.  Today, this crisis has blown into global scale similarly in three aspects - ecologic, economic, and social. Let's look deep into the works of this great contemporary writer, as he would speak directly to man's present concerns, for he was ahead of his time in developing a holistic view of man's place in the world. - avrotor

Of Mice and Men (1937) - One of Steinbeck’s popular works regularly taught in schools, this heartbreaking novella takes us back to California in the years of the Great Depression. Here, two farm workers, Lennie and George, chase their dream of owning a piece of land so they can settle down in peace. But childlike and physically powerful Lennie, whose only wish is to keep pet rabbits so he can stroke their soft fur, unwittingly poses difficulties for him and his protective friend. This deeply affecting story about friendship, loneliness, and hope is at once gentle and crushing, and will remain with you long after you’ve turned the final page.

 “As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment.” - John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

 

The Winter of Our Discontent (1961) was Steinbeck’s final novel. It takes place in a small East Coast town, where Ethan Allen Hawley must come to terms with his personal failings, as well as the moral cost inherent in ‘rising’ in the world. Reminiscent of Arthur Miller’s plays, this novel conducts an unsettling search into the dark corners of the human soul, uncovering an inevitable sense of decline, and a disheartening discrepancy between the world’s appearance and the seedy nature of its true workings. Weighed down by his family’s once glorious past and their ambitious expectations, Ethan feels pressured in his every move. As this sombre novel walks the line between tragedy and hope, readers find themselves feeling both alienated from and reconnected to their own humanity.

“Does anyone ever know even the outer fringe of another?” - John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent, 1961

Cannery Row (1945) is a short novel dispenses with the necessities of conventional narrative arcs. Instead, its purpose is impressionistic: to convey, in around 150 pages, the sense of belonging to a community — a very specific kind of community rooted in the author’s memories of his Californian upbringing. You might not think that a tale about a grocery store owner, a biologist, a brothel owner, some drunks, prostitutes, and a few lost souls in a small Californian town would move you. But you would be wrong. Lit by the long shadows of Steinbeck’s discerning narration, this humble book touches on something profound, and will leave readers sinking into melancholy-tinged nostalgia for a past that isn’t even their own.

 “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.” - John Steinbeck, Cannery Row, 1945

dd to library 

The Red Pony (1933) is an episodic novella. In other words, it’s a novella comprising four stories. All four focus on Jody Tiflin, a young boy living in a Salinas valley ranch. This affecting coming-of-age book sees Jody learn important, at times heartbreaking lessons about life and death. In the first story, Jody is given a red pony by his father, an animal he grows to love with all his youthful heart, but his world is shattered when misfortune strikes. Beautiful and tender, The Red Pony is an emotionally distressing book that charts the process of growing up one painful, innocence-shattering moment at a time.

“In the grey quiet mornings when the land and the brush and the houses and the trees were silver-grey and black like a photograph negative, he stole toward the barn, past the sleeping stones and the sleeping cypress tree.” - John Steinbeck, The Red Pony

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The Grapes of Wrath, 1939.  This realist novel is probably Steinbeck's most famous work; it netted him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1940 and is considered by many to be among the most influential American novels. Set during the Great Depression, this classic historical fiction novel has a tumultuous past: banned from a number of schools and libraries when first published, it went on to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and sell more than 15 million copies. The story follows the Joads, a poor family of farm workers from Oklahoma, as they make a long and desperate journey west in pursuit of work. In a season of unforgiving drought, farm workers like the Joads find themselves struggling for food, non exploitative labor, and simple dignity. Steinbeck’s unassuming, unflinching, and lyrical work is essential reading not just for American readers, but anyone with a heart — it’s no wonder this novel often comes up in lists recommending the best books of all time.

Favorite quote: “The movement changed them; the highways, the camps along the road, the fear of hunger and the hunger itself, changed them. The children without dinner changed them, the endless moving changed them. They were migrants.”

Other Books of John Steinbeck

Steinbeck wrote a total of 25 published books, 16 are novels.  His first is Tortilla Flat, and last, The Winter of Our Discontent.

 

Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962)

Sweet Thursday (1954)

The Pastures of Heaven (1932

To a God Unknown (1933)

In Dubious Battle (1936)

The Moon Is Down (1942)

The Wayward Bus (1947

The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951)

                        

                         Acknowledgement with gratitude: Internet, text and images