
1942: "Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team"-A nonfiction account of Steinbeck's experiences with several World War II American Army Air bomber crews.1942: "The Moon Is Down"-A story of a small coastal town in northern Europe that is overrun by an unnamed army (thought to be a fictionalization of the occupation of Norway by the Nazis in World War II).1941: "The Forgotten Village"-A documentary film written by Steinbeck and narrated by Burgess Meredith, about a Mexican village grappling with modernization.Steinbeck's best-known novel and winner of the Pulitzer and other literary prizes. 1939: "The Grapes of Wrath"-A poor migrant family from Oklahoma and their struggles to find a place in California.The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. Drawing on Biblical parallels, East of Eden is an epic that explores the writer’s deepest and most anguished concerns within a landscape that for him had mythic resonance. Ambitious in scale and original in structure, East of Eden (1952) recounts the violent and emotionally turbulent history of a Salinas Valley family through several generations. The Pearl appears here with the original illustrations by José Clemente Orozco. Expanding on an anecdote he had heard about a boy who found a pearl of unusual size, Steinbeck turned it into an allegory of the corrupting influence of sudden wealth. Steinbeck’s long involvement with Mexican culture is distilled in The Pearl (1947).


The comic and bawdy evocation of the main street of Monterey’s sardine-canning district has made this one of the most popular of all Steinbeck’s novels. The Moon Is Down (1942), set in an unnamed Scandinavian country under German occupation, dramatizes the transformation of ordinary life under totalitarian rule and the underground struggle against the Nazi invaders.In Cannery Row (1945) Steinbeck paid tribute to his closest friend, the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, in the central character of Doc, proprietor of the Western Biological Laboratory and spiritual and financial mainstay of a cast of philosophical drifters and hangers-on. This third volume in The Library of America’s authoritative edition of John Steinbeck‘s writings shows one of America’s most enduring popular writers continuing restlessly to explore new subject matter and new approaches to storytelling.
