Download or read book Steinbeck s Uneasy America written by Barbara A. Heavilin and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first scholarly assessment of Steinbeck's bestselling travelogue Travels with Charley, published in 1962, a narrative that blurs the lines between nonfiction and fiction Steinbeck's Uneasy America is the first collection of critical scholarship devoted to Travels with Charley in Search of America, John Steinbeck's best-selling, late-career travel memoir. In 1960, Steinbeck was a renowned man of American letters. Many considered him America's troubadour of ordinary people, the conscience of the country. But weakened by two small strokes and anxious that he had lost touch with America, he embarked on a cross-country road trip accompanied by his wife's standard poodle, Charley. Two years later, he published Travels with Charley to popular acclaim and robust sales. Throughout this narrative, Steinbeck insists that all of our perceptions are "warped" by personality, history, and society. And while this hybrid and experimental book has long been accepted as an accurate account of his journey, journalists and scholars agree that the narrative is part factual, part fiction--America as seen through Steinbeck's particular "warp." The work is long overdue for scholarly assessment. Steinbeck's Uneasy America explores three main topics. Part 1 explores genre and form to consider the degree to which the work is fiction or nonfiction. Part 2 assesses Steinbeck's increasingly bleak assessment of America--almost a jeremiad that warns citizens of ecological excess and political apathy. Part 3 focuses on Travels with Charley as a road text, travel adventure, and literary influence. This volume's authors offer rich scholarly insights and a wealth of stories, facts, and anecdotes about Steinbeck and the adventures and misadventures he and Charley met on the road. Lively and groundbreaking, the collection both enlightens and enlivens discussions of Steinbeck and of the twentieth-century American book world. CONTRIBUTORS Danica Čerče / William P. Childers / Donald V. Coers / Robert DeMott / Cecilia Donohue / Charles Etheridge / Mimi R. Gladstein / Barbara A. Heavilin / Kathleen Hicks / Carter Davis Johnson / Gavin Jones / Sally S. Kleberg / Jay Parini / Brian Railsback / Susan Shillinglaw / Nicholas P. Taylor

Download or read book My Life With John Steinbeck written by and published by LawsonPublishing Ltd. This book was released on 2018-09-06 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time,the story ofJohn Steinbecksforgotten second wife,unmentioned in standard editions of his classics,such as The Grapes of Wrath..Their 1943 wartime marriage ended when she divorced him in 1948..Smart, adventurous and in love,she at first matched Steinbecks zest for on the road advntures but was then only too happy to settle down and make a home where he could write.Love and marriage were considered the appropriate vocation for women of her era.Gwyn paid a high price for her involvement of the restless,driven,genius,John Steinbeck.This was a marriage, which could not succeed despite her love for Steinbeck,the man and master storyteller.

Download or read book The Grapes of Wrath written by John Steinbeck and published by . This book was released on 2023-06-16 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Grapes of Wrath is a novel written by John Steinbeck that tells the story of the Joad family's journey from Oklahoma to California during the Great Depression. The novel highlights the struggles and hardships faced by migrant workers during this time, as well as the exploitation they faced at the hands of wealthy landowners. Steinbeck's writing style is raw and powerful, with vivid descriptions that bring the characters and their surroundings to life. The novel has been widely acclaimed for its social commentary and remains a classic in American literature. Despite being published over 80 years ago, the novel still resonates with readers today, serving as a reminder of the importance of empathy and compassion towards those who are less fortunate.

Download or read book The Winter of Our Discontent written by John Steinbeck and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-08-26 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The final novel of one of America’s most beloved writers—a tale of degeneration, corruption, and spiritual crisis A Penguin Classic 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 of Steinbeck’s last novel, works as a clerk in a grocery store that his family once owned. With Ethan no longer a member of Long Island’s aristocratic class, his wife is restless, and his teenage children are hungry for the tantalizing material comforts he cannot provide. Then one day, in a moment of moral crisis, Ethan decides to take a holiday from his own scrupulous standards. Set in Steinbeck’s contemporary 1960 America, the novel explores the tenuous line between private and public honesty, and today ranks alongside his most acclaimed works of penetrating insight into the American condition. This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction and notes by leading Steinbeck scholar Susan Shillinglaw. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Download or read book Attempting Normal written by Marc Maron and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-04-30 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER People make a mess. Marc Maron was a parent-scarred, angst-filled, drug-dabbling, love-starved comedian who dreamed of a simple life: a wife, a home, a sitcom to call his own. But instead he woke up one day to find himself fired from his radio job, surrounded by feral cats, and emotionally and financially annihilated by a divorce from a woman he thought he loved. He tried to heal his broken heart through whatever means he could find—minor-league hoarding, Viagra addiction, accidental racial profiling, cat fancying, flying airplanes with his mind—but nothing seemed to work. It was only when he was stripped down to nothing that he found his way back. Attempting Normal is Marc Maron’s journey through the wilderness of his own mind, a collection of explosively, painfully, addictively funny stories that add up to a moving tale of hope and hopelessness, of failing, flailing, and finding a way. From standup to television to his outrageously popular podcast, WTF with Marc Maron, Marc has always been a genuine original, a disarmingly honest, intensely smart, brutally open comic who finds wisdom in the strangest places. This is his story of the winding, potholed road from madness and obsession and failure to something like normal, the thrillingly comic journey of a sympathetic f***up who’s trying really hard to do better without making a bigger mess. Most of us will relate. Praise for Attempting Normal “I laughed so hard reading this book.”—David Sedaris “Funny . . . surprisingly deep . . . laced with revelatory insights.”—Los Angeles Times “Superb . . . A reason that [it] is a superior example of an overcrowded genre—the comedian memoir—is Mr. Maron’s hardheaded approach to his history, the wisdom of experience.”—The New York Times “Marc Maron is a legend because he is both a great comic and a brilliant mind. Attempting Normal is a deep, hilarious megashot of feeling and truth as only this man can administer.”—Sam Lipsyte Praise for Marc Maron and WTF “The stuff of comedy legend.”—Rolling Stone “Marc Maron is a startlingly honest, compelling, and hilarious comedian-poet. Truly one of the greatest of all time.”—Louis C.K. “I’ve known Marc for years and I can tell you first hand that he’s passionate, fearless, honest, self-absorbed, neurotic, and screamingly funny.”—David Cross “Revered among his peers . . . raw and unflinchingly honest.”—Entertainment Weekly “Devastatingly funny.”—Los Angeles Times “For a comedy nerd, this show is nirvana.”—Judd Apatow

Download or read book East of Eden written by John Steinbeck and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2002-02-05 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A masterpiece of Biblical scope, and the magnum opus of one of America’s most enduring authors, in a commemorative hardcover edition In his journal, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck called East of Eden "the first book," and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth. Set in the rich farmland of California's Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families—the Trasks and the Hamiltons—whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. The masterpiece of Steinbeck’s later years, East of Eden is a work in which Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love's absence. Adapted for the 1955 film directed by Elia Kazan introducing James Dean, and read by thousands as the book that brought Oprah’s Book Club back, East of Eden has remained vitally present in American culture for over half a century.

Download or read book Working Days written by John Steinbeck and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1990-12-01 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath during an astonishing burst of activity between June and October of 1938. Throughout the time he was creating his greatest work, Steinbeck faithfully kept a journal revealing his arduous journey toward its completion. The journal, like the novel it chronicles, tells a tale of dramatic proportions—of dogged determination and inspiration, yet also of paranoia, self-doubt, and obstacles. It records in intimate detail the conception and genesis of The Grapes of Wrath and its huge though controversial success. It is a unique and penetrating portrait of an emblematic American writer creating an essential American masterpiece.

Download or read book Mad at the World A Life of John Steinbeck written by William Souder and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2021 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2020 in Nonfiction A resonant biography of America’s most celebrated novelist of the Great Depression. The first full-length biography of the Nobel laureate to appear in a quarter century, Mad at the World illuminates what has made the work of John Steinbeck an enduring part of the literary canon: his capacity for empathy. Pulitzer Prize finalist William Souder explores Steinbeck’s long apprenticeship as a writer struggling through the depths of the Great Depression, and his rise to greatness with masterpieces such as The Red Pony, Of Mice and Men, and The Grapes of Wrath. Angered by the plight of the Dust Bowl migrants who were starving even as they toiled to harvest California’s limitless bounty, fascinated by the guileless decency of the downtrodden denizens of Cannery Row, and appalled by the country’s refusal to recognize the humanity common to all of its citizens, Steinbeck took a stand against social injustice—paradoxically given his inherent misanthropy—setting him apart from the writers of the so-called "lost generation." A man by turns quick-tempered, compassionate, and ultimately brilliant, Steinbeck could be a difficult person to like. Obsessed with privacy, he was mistrustful of people. Next to writing, his favorite things were drinking and womanizing and getting married, which he did three times. And while he claimed indifference about success, his mid-career books and movie deals made him a lot of money—which passed through his hands as quickly as it came in. And yet Steinbeck also took aim at the corrosiveness of power, the perils of income inequality, and the urgency of ecological collapse, all of which drive public debate to this day. Steinbeck remains our great social realist novelist, the writer who gave the dispossessed and the disenfranchised a voice in American life and letters. Eloquent, nuanced, and deeply researched, Mad at the World captures the full measure of the man and his work.

Download or read book America and Americans written by John Steinbeck and published by . This book was released on 1968 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Cannery Row written by John Steinbeck and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2002-02-05 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Steinbeck's tough yet charming portrait of people on the margins of society, dependant on one another for both physical and emotional survival Published in 1945, Cannery Row focuses on the acceptance of life as it is: both the exuberance of community and the loneliness of the individual. Drawing on his memories of the real inhabitants of Monterey, California, including longtime friend Ed Ricketts, Steinbeck interweaves the stories of Doc, Dora, Mack and his boys, Lee Chong, and the other characters in this world where only the fittest survive, to create a novel that is at once one of his most humorous and poignant works. In her introduction, Susan Shillinglaw shows how the novel expresses, both in style and theme, much that is essentially Steinbeck: “scientific detachment, empathy toward the lonely and depressed…and, at the darkest level…the terror of isolation and nothingness.” For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Download or read book Whose Names Are Unknown written by Sanora Babb and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2012-11-20 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sanora Babb’s long-hidden novel Whose Names Are Unknown tells an intimate story of the High Plains farmers who fled drought dust storms during the Great Depression. Written with empathy for the farmers’ plight, this powerful narrative is based upon the author’s firsthand experience. This clear-eyed and unsentimental story centers on the fictional Dunne family as they struggle to survive and endure while never losing faith in themselves. In the Oklahoma Panhandle, Milt, Julia, their two little girls, and Milt’s father, Konkie, share a life of cramped circumstances in a one-room dugout with never enough to eat. Yet buried in the drudgery of their everyday life are aspirations, failed dreams, and fleeting moments of hope. The land is their dream. The Dunne family and the farmers around them fight desperately for the land they love, but the droughts of the thirties force them to abandon their fields. When they join the exodus to the irrigated valleys of California, they discover not the promised land, but an abusive labor system arrayed against destitute immigrants. The system labels all farmers like them as worthless “Okies” and earmarks them for beatings and worse when hardworking men and women, such as Milt and Julia, object to wages so low they can’t possibly feed their children. The informal communal relations these dryland farmers knew on the High Plains gradually coalesce into a shared determination to resist. Realizing that a unified community is their best hope for survival, the Dunnes join with their fellow workers and begin the struggle to improve migrant working conditions through democratic organization and collective protest. Babb wrote Whose Names are Unknown in the 1930s while working with refugee farmers in the Farm Security Administration (FSA) camps of California. Originally from the Oklahoma Panhandle are herself, Babb, who had first come to Los Angeles in 1929 as a journalist, joined FSA camp administrator Tom Collins in 1938 to help the uprooted farmers. As Lawrence R. Rodgers notes in his foreword, Babb submitted the manuscript for this book to Random House for consideration in 1939. Editor Bennett Cerf planned to publish this “exceptionally fine” novel but when John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath swept the nation, Cerf explained that the market could not support two books on the subject. Babb has since shared her manuscript with interested scholars who have deemed it a classic in its own right. In an era when the country was deeply divided on social legislation issues and millions drifted unemployed and homeless, Babb recorded the stories of the people she greatly respected, those “whose names are unknown.” In doing so, she returned to them their identities and dignity, and put a human face on economic disaster and social distress.

Download or read book Steinbeck s Ghost written by Lewis Buzbee and published by Feiwel & Friends. This book was released on 2008-09-02 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's been two months since Travis's family moved to a development so new that it seems totally unreal. His parents are working harder now, to pay for it all, and Travis is left to fend for himself. There's one place, though, where Travis can still connect with his old life: the Salinas library. Travis and his family used to go there together every Saturday, but now he bikes to it alone, re-reading his favorite books. It's only natural that Travis likes the work of author John Steinbeck—after all, Salinas is Steinbeck's hometown. But that can't explain why Travis is suddenly seeing Steinbeck's characters spring to life. There's the homeless man in the alley behind the library, the line of figures at the top of a nearby ridge, the boy who writes by night in an attic bedroom. Travis has met them all before—as a reader. But why are they here now? And how? As Travis struggles to solve this mystery, budget cuts threaten his library. And so, he embarks on a journey through Steinbeck's beautiful California landscape, looking for a way to save his safe haven. It's only then that he begins to sort out fact from fiction, discovering the many ways a story can come alive—and stumbling into a story Steinbeck might have started, and Travis needs to complete. Here is a mystery that delves deeply into the ways that books take us, one at a time, out into the vast world.

Download or read book The Rise of American Air Power written by Michael S. Sherry and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1987-01-01 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes material on firebombing and nuclear warfare.

Download or read book The Other America written by Michael Harrington and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1997-08 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the economic underworld of migrant farm workers, the aged, minority groups, and other economically underprivileged groups.

Download or read book A Political Companion to John Steinbeck written by Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2013-05-15 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though he was a recipient of both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature, American novelist John Steinbeck (1902--1968) has frequently been censored. Even in the twenty-first century, nearly ninety years after his work first appeared in print, Steinbeck's novels, stories, and plays still generate controversy: his 1937 book Of Mice and Men was banned in some Mississippi schools in 2002, and as recently as 2009, he made the American Library Association's annual list of most frequently challenged authors. A Political Companion to John Steinbeck examines the most contentious political aspects of the author's body of work, from his early exploration of social justice and political authority during the Great Depression to his later positions regarding domestic and international threats to American policies. Featuring contemporaneous and present-day interpretations of his novels and essays by historians, literary scholars, and political theorists, this book covers the spectrum of Steinbeck's writing, exploring everything from his place in American political culture to his seeming betrayal of his leftist principles in later years.

Download or read book Reclaiming John Steinbeck written by Gavin Jones and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-10 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Steinbeck is a towering figure in twentieth-century American literature; yet he remains one of our least understood writers. This major reevaluation of Steinbeck by Gavin Jones uncovers a timely thinker who confronted the fate of humanity as a species facing climate change, environmental crisis, and a growing divide between the powerful and the marginalized. Driven by insatiable curiosity, Steinbeck's work crossed a variety of borders – between the United States and the Global South, between human and nonhuman lifeforms, between science and the arts, and between literature and film – to explore the transformations in consciousness necessary for our survival on a precarious planet. Always seeking new forms to express his ecological and social vision of human interconnectedness and vulnerability, Steinbeck is a writer of urgent concern for the twenty-first century, even as he was haunted by the legacies of racism and injustice in the American West.

Download or read book A John Steinbeck Encyclopedia written by Brian Railsback and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2006-09-30 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the greatest novelists of the 20th century, John Steinbeck continues to be read and studied at all levels. This encyclopedia extensively overviews his life and writings. Included are roughly 1200 alphabetically arranged entries by more than 40 expert contributors. Entries cover his works, major characters, family members and contemporaries, influences, and various special topics related to his literary career. Many of the entries cite works for further reading, and the encyclopedia closes with a selected, general bibliography. Known for his searing social criticism, John Steinbeck is one of the most popular and influential American writers of the 20th century. His works are read and studied at all levels and have been made into films. And though critics and scholars initially found fault with his enormously popular works, he is now widely recognizes as a master of his craft. This encyclopedia provides an extensive overview of his life and career and is accessible to high school students, undergraduates, and general readers. Presented are roughly 1200 alphabetically arranged entries by more than 40 expert contributors. These entries cover his works, major characters, family members and contemporaries, influences, and a range of special topics.