The story of a farm family's Depression-era journey from the Dustbowl of Oklahoma to the California migrant labor camps in search of a better life.

For the diver Kino, finding a magnificent pearl means the promise of better life for his impoverished family. His dream blinds him to the greed and suspicions the pearl arouses in him and his neighbors, and even his loving wife cannot temper his obsession or stem the events leading to tragedy. Kino and his wife illustrate the fall from innocence of people who believe that wealth erases all problems.

"Chronicles the deeds of paisanos, their multiple loves, wonderful brawls, Rabelaisian wine drinking as they fiercely resist the corrupting tide of honest toil in the surrounding ocean of civil rectitude"--Cover.

In the California apple country, nine hundred migratory workers rise up "in dubious battle" against the landowners. The group takes on a life of its own-stonger than its individual members and more frightening. led by the doomed Jim Nolan, the strike is founded on his tragic idealism-on the "courage never to submit or yield."

In an unnamed country (similar to Norway) during World War II, a German sympathizer lures local men and the town's twelve soldiers into the forest long enough for the Germans to take the town. They occupy the home of the mayor as a sign of their power and commandeer the local coal mine. Mayor Orden has never before been a brave or very forceful man, but he is not a fool, and while he tries to keep order in the town, as the Germans demand, he refuses...

From the Publisher: From a swashbuckling pirate fantasy to a meditation on American morality-two classic Steinbeck novels make their black spine debuts. 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...

Life continues much the same in the Cannery Row district of Monterey, California, following World War II--with the exception that there are no more fish to can, and Doc discovers the missing ingredient in his life is love.

Being drafted as ruler of France has life-changing consequences for M. Pippin Arnult Heristal, amateur astronomer, and for his wife, his art-dealer uncle, his glamour-struck daughter, and others of and not of his circle