John

Hardened by years on a California ranch, young Jody Tiflin is ready to assume more adult responsibilities. His father gives him a pony--under strict instructions to manage the animal's care. But Jody soon learns that the first steps toward maturity can lead directly down the cruel path of fate.

Cannery Row focuses on the acceptance of life as is--both the exuberance of community and the loneliness of the individual. Creating characters based on his memories of real inhabitants of Monterey, California, Steinbeck interweaves the stories of Doc, Henri, Mack, and the boys in a world where only the fittest survive.

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

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.

A collection of Steinbeck's classic journalistic pieces and nonfiction stories.

In 1941, Steinbeck and his close friend Ed Ricketts, a marine biologist, rented a ship and set about exploring the Gulf of California. The scientific data collected, along with Steinbeck's log of the journey, were detailed in the work Sea of Cortez. Ten years later, the log was published on its own, chock-full of elegantly described marine life and often-amusing anecdotes about the adventure.

Just after the Iron Curtain fell on Eastern Europe, John Steinbeck and Robert Capa ventured into the Soviet Union to report for the New York Herald Tribune. This rare opportunity took the famous travelers not only to Moscow and Stalingrad--now Volgograd--but through the countryside of the Ukraine and the Caucasus. Hailed by the New York Times as "superb" when it first appeared in 1948, this work is the distillation of their journey and remains a remarkable...

A man can't scrap his bloodline, can't snip the thread of immortality. Such is the strength of Joe Saul's desperate longing for a child, that he feels as if a dark curse is upon him after three unfruitful years of marriage. Yet unbeknown to him, he is sterile. His beautiful, young, devoted wife loves him so much that she secretly conceives the child of another man. But when Joe discovers her deception, his anguish is greater than ever before.