John Steinbeck

"Cannery Row is just a few blocks long. Within its limits are the sardine fisheries which give the Row its name. The story that builds up around this area and the memorable characters who inhabit it is infused with warmth, understanding, and a great fund of human values." -- From inside book jacket.

In his journal, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck called East of Eden "the first book," and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth. Set in the rich farmland of California's Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families-the Trasks and the Hamiltons-whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.

The final novel of one of America’s most beloved writers-a tale of degeneration, corruption, and spiritual crisis In awarding John Steinbeck the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel committee stated that with The Winter of Our Discontent, he had “resumed his position as an independent expounder of the truth, with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American. ” Ethan Allen Hawley, the protagonist of Steinbeck’s last novel, works...

When an their vessel is torpedoed in the Atlantic Ocean during WWII, eight survivors find refuge in a lifeboat. Short on food and water, their situation is further complicated when they rescue a crew member from the German submarine that sank their ship.

Cal Trask is considered the "bad" son of taciturn Salinas Valley lettuce farmer Adam Trask. Although Cal always means well, he just can't stay out of trouble. Neither is Cal able to match the high esteem in which his father holds his "good" brother Aron. Only Aron's girl friend Abra and kindly old Doctor Sam seem to be able to see the essential goodness in the troublesome Cal. In an effort to win his father's love, Cal purchases a fresh lettuce crop...