For the diver Kino, finding a magnificent pearl means the promise of better life for his impoverished family. His dream blinds him to the greed and suspicions the pearl arouses in him and his neighbors, and even his loving wife cannot temper his obsession or stem the events leading to tragedy. Kino and his wife illustrate the fall from innocence of people who believe that wealth erases all problems.

This sprawling and often brutal novel, set in the rich farmlands of California's Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families--the Trasks' and the Hamilton's--whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. The story of two brothers, Aron is a clean-cut model student, engaged to be married, the pride of his hardworking father. Cal is a rebellious loner, sternly rejected...

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.

A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Steinbeck's brilliant short novels
Collected here for the first time in a deluxe paperback volume are six of John Steinbeck's most widely read and beloved novels. From the tale of commitment, loneliness and hope in Of Mice and Men, to the tough yet charming portrait of people on the margins of society in Cannery Row, to The Pearl's examination of the fallacy of the American dream, Steinbeck stories of...

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...

the chrysanthemums;the white quail;flight;the snake;breakfast;the raid;the harness;the vigilante; johnny bear;the murder;st. katy the virgin;red pony,the gift,the great mountains,the promise;the leader of the people

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...

This exciting day-by-day account of Steinbeck's trip to the Gulf of California with biologist Ed Ricketts, drawn from the longer Sea of Cortez, is a wonderful combination of science, philosophy, and high-spirited adventure. Annotation. In 1940, Steinbeck and his friend, biologist Ed Ricketts, ventured into the Gulf of California to search for marine invertebrates along the beaches. This exciting, day-by-day account of their trip, drawn from the longer...