A controversial tale of friendship and tragedy during the Great DepressionOver seventy-five years since its first publication, Steinbecks tale of commitment, loneliness, hope, and loss remains one of Americas most widely read and taught novels. An unlikely pair, George and Lennie, two migrant workers in California during the Great Depression, grasp for their American Dream. They hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. For George...

Penguin Classics commemorates the 50th anniversary of Steinbeck's Nobel Prize with two stunning new editions of his best-loved worksAt age fifty-eight, John Steinbeck and his poodle, Charley, embarked on a journey across America. This chronicle of their trip meanders from small towns to growing cities to glorious wilderness oases. Still evocative and awe-inspiring after fifty years, Travels with Charley in Search of America provides an intimate look...

Vividly depicts the colorful, sometimes disreputable, inhabitants of a run-down area in Monterey, California. Cannery Row is a book with a minimally developed plot. Instead, it's an attempt to depict the atmosphere and characters of a particular place-the cannery neighbourhood of Monterey, California, which is home to a mix of the poor and individuals who prefer not to live "up the hill" in the more respectable part of town for a variety of reasons....

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...

In Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck's beautifully rendered depictions of small yet fateful moments that transform ordinary lives, these twelve early stories introduce both the subject and style of artistic expression that recur in the most important works of his career. Each of these self-contained stories is linked to the others by the presence of the Munroes, a family whose misguided behavior and lack of sensitivity precipitate disasters and tragedies....

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

In Monterey, on the California coast, Sweet Thursday is what they call the day after Lousy Wednesday, which is one of those days that are just naturally bad. Returning to the scene of Cannery Row,the weedy lots and junk heaps and flophouses of Monterey, John Steinbeck once more brings to life the denizens of a netherworld of laughter and tears, from Fauna, new headmistress of the local brothel, to Hazel, a bum whose mother must have wanted a daughter....

On his new ranch in California, Joseph Wayne sees a huge tree as the symbol of his father's spirit. But then one of his brothers, terrified by Joseph's pagan beliefs, kills the tree.