John Steinbeck: Novels 1942-1952 (Loa #132): The Moon Is Down / Cannery Row / The Pearl / East of Eden

This third volume in The Library of America's authoritative edition of John Steinbeck's writings shows one of America's most enduring popular writers continuing restlessly to explore new subject matter and new approaches to storytelling.

The Moon Is Down (1942), set in an unnamed Scandinavian country under German occupation, dramatizes the transformation of ordinary life under totalitarian rule and the underground struggle against the Nazi invaders.In Cannery Row (1945) Steinbeck paid tribute to his closest friend, the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, in the central character of Doc, proprietor of the Western Biological Laboratory and spiritual and financial mainstay of a cast of philosophical drifters and hangers-on. The comic and bawdy evocation of the main street of Monterey's sardine-canning district has made this one of the most popular of all Steinbeck's novels. Steinbeck's long involvement with Mexican culture is distilled in The Pearl (1947). Expanding on an anecdote he had heard about a boy who found a pearl of unusual size, Steinbeck turned it into an allegory of the corrupting influence of sudden wealth. The Pearl appears here with the original illustrations by José Clemente Orozco.

Ambitious in scale and original in structure, East of Eden (1952) recounts the violent and emotionally turbulent history of a Salinas Valley family through several generations. Drawing on Biblical parallels, East of Eden is an epic that explores the writer's deepest and most anguished concerns within a landscape that for him had mythic resonance.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Author: John Steinbeck
Publisher: Library of America
Published: 02/18/2002
Pages: 983
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.40lbs
Size: 8.17h x 5.30w x 1.36d
ISBN: 9781931082075
Audience: Young Adult


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 01/01/2002 pg. 18
BookPage 02/01/2002 pg. 8
Library Journal 02/15/2002 pg. 184

About the Author
John Steinbeck (1902-1968) is the author of such celebrated works as Tortilla Flat (1935), Of Mice and Men (1937), and The Grapes of Wrath (1939), for which he won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962.

Robert DeMott, volume editor, is the Edwin and Ruth Kennedy Distinguished Professor at Ohio University and the author of Steinbeck's Typewriter, an award-winning book of critical essays.