John Steinbeck, born in Salinas, California, in 1902, grew up in a fertile agricultural valley, about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast. Both the valley and the coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929).
After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two
California books, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a
God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later collected
in The Long Valley (1938). Popular success and financial
security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935), stories about
Monterey's paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his
career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Three powerful novels
of the late 1930s focused on the California laboring class: In
Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the
book considered by many his finest, The Grapes of Wrath
(1939). The Grapes of Wrath won both the National Book Award
and the Pulitzer Prize in 1939. Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck
became a filmmaker with The Forgotten Village (1941) and a
serious student of marine biology with Sea of Cortez (1941).
He devoted his services to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and
the controversial play-novelette The Moon is Down
(1942).Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (1948),
another experimental drama, Burning Bright(1950), and The
Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951) preceded publication of the
monumental East of Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the
Salinas Valley and his own family's history. The last decades of
his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third
wife, with whom he traveled widely. Later books include Sweet
Thursday (1954), The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A
Fabrication (1957), Once There Was a War (1958), The
Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels with Charley in
Search of America (1962), America and Americans (1966),
and the posthumously published Journal of a Novel: The East of
Eden Letters (1969), Viva Zapata!(1975), The Acts of
King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976), and Working Days:
The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (1989). Steinbeck received
the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, and, in 1964, he was
presented with the United States Medal of Freedom by President
Lyndon B. Johnson. Steinbeck died in New York in 1968. Today, more
than thirty years after his death, he remains one of America's
greatest writers and cultural figures.
Linda Wagner-Martin is Frank Borden Hanes Professor of English
at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the editor
of The Portable Edith Wharton.
Kino, a poor Mexican pearl fisher, finds a valuable pearl. Yet instead of bringing blessings, the pearl acts as a harbinger of misfortune to Kino and his wife, Juana. Ultimately, it is returned from whence it came. Steinbeck's parable, originally published in 1947, is a well-written retelling of an old Mexican folktale. Hector Elizondo, with his fine voice and great diction, reads with sincerity, keeping this simple, tragic tale moving toward its inevitable conclusion. Highly recommended for all collections.-Denise A. Garofalo, Mid-Hudson Lib. System, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
"[The Pearl] has the distinction and sincerity that are evident in everything he writes."--The New Yorker"Form is the most important thing about him. It is at its best in this work." --Commonweal "[Steinbeck has] long trained his prose style for such a task as this: that supple unstrained, muscular power, responsive to the slightest pull of the reins."--Chicago Sunday Times
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