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John SteinbeckA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Now considered to be one of the most significant American writers of the 20th century, John Steinbeck was born and grew up in California, which would serve as the setting for much of his fiction: The Pearl is set in Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula. Steinbeck’s experience as a laborer and journalist throughout the 1920s led him to feature sympathetic, working-class protagonists in much of his fiction. He is best known today for his 1939 novel, The Grapes of Wrath, which follows the struggles of Oklahoma tenant farmers who travel to California in search of work after losing their farms to bank foreclosures during the Great Depression; the novel won the National Book Award as well as a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. At the same time, Steinbeck also received intense criticism for his then-radical views on labor. Like The Grapes of Wrath, The Pearl examines the personal cost of exploitative economic policies, although within a different historical context.
Steinbeck demonstrated a lifelong interest in marine biology, which was his intended area of study at Stanford University, though he never completed his degree. In 1940, he took a six-week trip along the Gulf of California, collecting specimens with his friend Ed Ricketts, himself a marine biologist.
By John Steinbeck
Cannery Row
John Steinbeck
East of Eden
John Steinbeck
Flight
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In Dubious Battle
John Steinbeck
Of Mice and Men
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Sweet Thursday
John Steinbeck
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights
John Steinbeck
The Chrysanthemums
John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck
The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath
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The Log From The Sea of Cortez
John Steinbeck
The Long Valley
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The Moon Is Down
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The Red Pony
John Steinbeck
The Wayward Bus
John Steinbeck
The Winter Of Our Discontent
John Steinbeck
To a God Unknown
John Steinbeck
Tortilla Flat
John Steinbeck
Travels With Charley
John Steinbeck