"For the diver Kino, finding a magnificent pearl means the promise of a better life for his impoverished family. His dreams blind him to the greed that the pearl arouses in him and his neighbors. Baring the fallacy of the American dream-that wealth erases all problems-Steinbeck's classic illustrates our fall from innocence."--Pub.desc.

The ambitions, dreams, failings, and innermost thoughts of a diverse group of passengers are revealed as they travel aboard a bus along the backroads of California

Recounts the adventures and misadventures of cannery workers living in the run-down waterfront section of Monterey, California.

In the California apple country, nine hundred migratory workers rise up "in dubious battle" against the landowners. The group takes on a life of its own-stonger than its individual members and more frightening. led by the doomed Jim Nolan, the strike is founded on his tragic idealism-on the "courage never to submit or yield."

In an unnamed country (similar to Norway) during World War II, a German sympathizer lures local men and the town's twelve soldiers into the forest long enough for the Germans to take the town. They occupy the home of the mayor as a sign of their power and commandeer the local coal mine. Mayor Orden has never before been a brave or very forceful man, but he is not a fool, and while he tries to keep order in the town, as the Germans demand, he refuses...

Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row, Of Mice and Men Tortilla Flat

The moving and beautiful story of a boy, a sorrel colt and the sun-drenched California earth." Junius Maltby: After ten years as a San Francisco accountant, Junius moves to sunny Pastures of Heaven, marries, has a son and becomes poverty stricken through laziness. When he realizes he is hurting his son, he has to make a decision.

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...