Washoe County Library System

A story of a Chinese peasant and his passionate, dogged accumulation of land and more land, while weathering famine and drought and revolution.

A family of six disintegrates after a daughter is raped by a high-school student. It happens to the wealthy Mulvaneys in upstate New York. The disgrace--there is some question if it was rape--sends the father to drink and financial ruin, the girl leaves home, the others follow. By the author of What I Lived For.

After her husband Charlie leaves for the Union Army, Alice Bullock finds herself sharing an Iowa farm with her formidable mother-in-law, and then she's accused of murder.

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....