John Steinbeck

Collects six short novels from one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century.

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.

On his new ranch in California, Joseph Wayne sees a huge tree as the symbol of his father's spirit. But then one of his brothers, terrified by Joseph's pagan beliefs, kills the tree.

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.

In the California apple country, 900 migratory workers rise up "in dubious battle" against the landowners. The group takes on a life of its own, stronger than its individual members and more frightening. Led by the doomed Jim Nolan, the strike springs from his tragic idealism, from the "courage never to submit or yield."

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...

Steinbeck turns the French Revolution upside down as amateur astronomer Pippin Héristal is drafted to rule the unruly French. Steinbeck creates around the infamous Pippin the most hilarious royal court ever: Pippin's wife, Queen Marie, who "might have taken her place at the bar of a very good restaurant"; his uncle, a man of dubious virtue; his glamour-struck daughter and her beau, the son of the so-called "egg king" of Petaluma, California; and...