A collection of Steinbeck novels from his last notable period, which ends with his ambitious Salinas Valley epic, East of Eden, published when he was 50.
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"More than his familiar, iconic fiction, this collection conveys a real sense of one of our best—and best-loved—writers."
February of next year is the centennial of Steinbeck's birth and, along with new Penguin editions of six of his novels, Viking is offering up this collection from the other, lesser-known, side of his career.
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"The present version remains an erratically charming curiosity."
"Jehan Stynebec" maintained a lifelong devotion to the 15th-century minor hoodlum and "knyght presoner, sir Thomas Malleorre," and long cherished the idea of retelling the Matter of Arthur for our time.
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"And considering the impact of the late novelist's Joads compared with the forgettable Trasks and Hamiltons, therein might lie a shade of moral."
What amounts to a working journal affixed to the pages of the first draft of East of Eden (1952) in the form of letters addressed to Steinbeck's editor, the late Pascal Covici.
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"It is a fascinating and disturbing book, uncomfortably close to the challenge the average man faces in today's materialistic world."
A major novel — the first since East of Eden — this brings into focus a conflict within a man's personality which will have wide, perhaps too wide, recognition value.
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"Good journalism, yes, but good literature as well."
Steinbeck's war dispatches were memorable, not perhaps for their historical value as a record but because of the vivid personal angle, the human bits, the vitality of capturing the feel of the war as seen on a troopship, in an airbase in England, behind the lines, and so on.
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Perhaps Cannery Row was not top Steinbeck, but I loved it, and the characters live today as vividly as when I first met them in his pages, ten years ago.
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"To many who came late to the banquet, here are some they may have missed."
Literary Guild selection for October pinpoints the importance of this republication in a single volume of the shorter novels, including Tortilla Flat.
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"But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus."
Tremendous in scope—tremendous in depth of penetration—and as different a Steinbeck as the Steinbeck of Burning Bright was from the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath.
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"Ricketts died three years ago and this edition carries a recently written profile tribute by Steinbeck."
This is to announce a re-issue of the beautiful book, originally published in 1941, of an expedition made to the Gulf of California by Ed Ricketts, a biologist, and the novelist.
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"The text of the book is about double the text that appeared in syndicated columns, but the deletions were for space not policy."
For a human picture of what life is like in Russia, as reported by a good observer and a perceptive photographer, A Russian Journal will help Americans know the Russians as people like themselves.
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"A parable, this, with no attempt to add to its simple pattern."
Steinbeck's peculiarly intense simplicity of technique is admirably displayed in this vignette — a simple, tragic tale of Mexican little people, a story retold by the pearl divers of a fishing hamlet until it has the quality of folk legend.
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"And one feels that to him, too, they are part of the flavor of a folk legend of today."
I loved it — and to my mind — it fits admirably an immediate need in our season's lists, — the need for a richly patterned story spun out of another layer of that peculiar underworld with which Steinbeck is at his best.
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"Not as tight writing as Steinbeck usually does — but good reading."
Call it a propaganda film — made to order for the U. S. Army Air Forces — and sold (for the Aid Society Trust Fund) at a phenomenal figure.
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