![]() The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he traveled widely. 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. He devoted his services to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play-novelette The Moon is Down (1942). The Grapes of Wrath won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1939.Įarly in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with The Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious student of marine biology with Sea of Cortez (1941). 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). A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Popular success and financial security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935), stories about Monterey’s paisanos. ![]() 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).Īfter 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). 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. Both the valley and the coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. ![]() When an author brings so much pain,pleasure and emotionally cutting fodder to the deepest part of you- for you to sort out and digest-and it also manages to bypasses your defenses to your soul, thats an artist still lives and is immortal.John Steinbeck, born in Salinas, California, in 1902, grew up in a fertile agricultural valley, about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast. Ive been compelled to read all of steinbecks major works in a row, since my first steinbeck book, the stunning EAST OF EDEN. the shallow will think oh I wont read that, and the wise will know that a work that can move you so much is defiantly worth reading. late last night I finished his last book-winter of our discontent-it put me into an immediate depression the instant I finished it. There should have been a book between cannery row and sweet thursday, Wish there was!! maybe Ill write it lol. I wish he had written more in this series,It seems to me it was his intention, because theres quite a gap in years. Steinbeck knows how to write of this sphere because he lived it. Needles to say the above is but 1 element of this story. a community of that time that's reasonably Simple,honest and, caring,excepting ,thoughtful and,un-poisoned by money, bureaucracy,greed,status and voracious land,development, I love how that old boiler was fixed up twice as a place to live lol- and how the palace flophouse and the whorehouse where also excepted parts of the community.Its a time and place where People were judged by who they were rather than what they did for a living or how they dressed. so you can imagine my joy in finding all those elements in this book and its sequel sweet thursday. I've been looking for a place exactly like cannery row in all its simplistic beauty complete with all its character and characters since I was born. It isn't Grapes Of Wrath, but it is still a fine work by an author who knows how to build characters that are irresistible. If you like Steinbeck this short book will not disappoint. The narrator does a nice job of giving voice to people who we can only try to imagine from the words on the page as they share their story of respect, loneliness and community. Steinbeck takes us through the slow motion disaster of a party and builds tension as we wait for Doc to return home to the destruction Mack and the Boys created. They want to express gratitude for Doc and make a mess of things. Mack and the Boys are everywhere and add spice to the community on Cannery Row. Yet he is empty in places that Steinbeck is able to reveal and describe. Doc is the main character, a man with a solid education, job and place in the world of marine biology. They are not people like me, yet they are every part of my life experience. The story is about respect and how people on Cannery Row have lives devoid of meaning apart from place and time. Steinbeck builds characters that you fall in love with and then struggle to support as they drift into trouble usually of their own making.
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