Back Novels 1942–1952

John Steinbeck: Novels 1942–1952

The Moon Is Down | Cannery Row | The Pearl | East of Eden

Edited by Robert DeMott

“Steinbeck thought East of Eden his best work. We won’t argue.” — Kirkus Reviews

Overview

Overview

News Adopt this book: John Steinbeck: Novels 1942–1952
March 1, 2021

Interviews New life of John Steinbeck reveals a writer “fueled by anger”
October 14, 2020

The Moviegoer Unforgettable lonely boy James Dean carries East of Eden on his narrow shoulders
May 16, 2017

Buy all four Steinbeck volumes and save $47.50.

The third volume in The Library of America’s authoritative edition of John Steinbeck’s writings shows him continuing to explore new subject matter and new approaches to storytelling. These four novels display the versatility and emotional directness that have made Steinbeck one of America’s most enduringly popular writers.

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. Told largely in dialogue, the book was conceived simultaneously as a novel and a play, and was successfully produced on Broadway. Although some American critics found its treatment of the German characters too sympathetic, The Moon Is Down was widely read in occupied areas of Europe, where it was regarded as an inspiring contribution to the resistance.

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 Monterey’s sardine-canning district“a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream“has made this one of the most popular of all of Steinbeck’s novels.

Steinbeck’s long involvement with Mexican culture is distilled in The Pearl (1947). Expanding on an anecdote he heard in Baja California about a local boy who had found a pearl of unusual size, Steinbeck turned it into a parable 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, encompassing a period stretching from the Civil War to World War I, and incorporating, as counterpoint to the central story, some of the actual history of Steinbeck’s mother’s family, 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. (East of Eden was a recent selection of Oprah’s Book Club.)

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.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.

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ISBN: 978-1-93108207-5 983 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 132 Library of America Series

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John Steinbeck: Novels 1942–1952

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