Product Description

Today, nearly forty years after his death, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck remains one of America’s greatest writers and cultural figures. We have begun publishing his many works for the first time as blackspine Penguin Classics featuring eye-catching, newly commissioned art. This season we continue with the seven spectacular and influential books East of Eden, Cannery Row, In Dubious Battle, The Long Valley, The Moon Is Down, The Pastures of Heaven, and Tortilla Flat. Penguin Classics is proud to present these seminal works to a new generation of readers—and to the many who revisit them again and again.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #424672 in Books
• Published on: 1995-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780140187489
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
A man whose work was equal to the vast social themes that drove him. -- Don DeLillo

John Steinbeck knew and understood America and Americans better than any other writer of the twentieth century. -- The Dallas Morning News

Review
John Steinbeck knew and understood America and Americans better than any other writer of the twentieth century. (The Dallas Morning News) A man whose work was equal to the vast social themes that drove him. (Don DeLillo)

About the Author
JOHN STEINBECK (1902–1968) was born in Salinas, California. He worked as a laborer and a journalist, and in 1935, when he published Tortilla Flat, he achieved popular success and financial security. Steinbeck wrote more than twenty-five novels and won the Nobel Prize in 1962. Nearly all of his books are available in Penguin Classics.

Customer Reviews

Unforgettable.
My mother, not a reader herself but trusting that anything sold by the Baptists & titled "The Pastures of Heaven" had to be OK, bought this book from a clearance table at the Baptist Book Store in Dallas TX as a Christmas present for (then) 8-year-old me.

I devoured it at 8 and--except for "Travels With Charley"--still love it more than anything else Steinbeck wrote. The crystal-clear (to a grownup) allusions to prostitution & incest sailed right over my innocent head, but the funny or tragic (usually both) stories of the wildly disparate kinds of people who settled in the Salinas Valley (can anyone flesh out fictional characters like Steinbeck does, and with so few adjectives?), and the image of how that beautiful green valley must have looked to the pioneers after their ordeal of mountains & desert, have stayed with me for almost 60 years.

I'm now going to order a copy to replace the barely-hanging-together one inscribed "From Mom & Dad, Christmas 1944". (Yellowed "Clearance $.25" sticker still on the back.)

A Rare Multi-read book; a Different Sort of Steinbeck
You needn't be familiar with Steinbeck's work to enjoy Pastures of Heaven. Indeed, he wasn't a well-known writer at the time of its publication. But you DO need to be familiar with the way books used to be read -- over and over and over, allowing the richness of a work to be revealed after multiple readings. So it is with Pastures of Heaven.

Certainly, a single reading of this work is rewarding and each story alone could serve as a great introduction to Steinbeck's style and grace. But these stories are interrelated in ways that appear only on the second and third and fourth readings. And...the book should probably be read slowly. (Hint: pay VERY close attention to the first story!)

Like other readers, I, too, was disappointed/puzzled after the first reading, but then I found certain images from the book would appear to me weeks and months later. I found the book again in my bags as I traveled cross-country and re-read it slowly, taking two nights to read each story. As I drove the next day, I'd let my mind wander over the textual terrain it had encountered the night before. The story grew in richness and complexity this way and has left me fully satisfied. It remains within close reach on my shelf.

While the book as written is a treasure -- one often neglected in discussions of Steinbeck's portfolio -- I have to say that time is changing its nature. As the book nears its 75th birthday, it gets only more true; the universality every good story has is here exemplified and magnified. Centuries from now, this book may be seen not so much as a portrait of its time, but rather a timeless tale, merely set conveniently in a place and era Steinbeck knew well; in this sense, the work reminds me of Shakespeare's work.

Final thought: the work also grows richer by the reader's extension of it. The reader will inevitably draw parallels with his or her own life; doing a little contemporary research to investigate side avenues also give the book more depth. I was distracted for a week comparing Steinbeck's Tularecito with Shakespeare's Caliban.

In short, if you are an inquisitive, thinking reader, one not afraid to give as much to Steinbeck's novel as he has given to you, then you will enjoy this book immensely.

A pleasant surprise, yet unlike Steinbeck's other works
For me, reading Steinbeck is a hit-and-miss endeavor. So "The Pastures of Heaven," undeservedly one of Steinbeck's least-known works, is a pleasant and affecting surprise--a volume of interlinking stories (simply called "chapters") whose mature style and semi-mystical themes remind me, oddly enough, of Garcia Marquez. This collection is not your typical Steinbeck, but it's memorable and astonishingly elegant nonetheless.

Although every story in the book has something to recommend it (I can't imagine any reader not liking at least several of them), I especially enjoyed one, labeled Chapter VI. (The story must have had particular resonance for Steinbeck as well, since he later published it separately in a private edition entitled "Nothing So Monstrous" and added an epilogue.) About a widower who faces the community's disapproval of the unorthodox way he raises his son, this edisode will haunt me for some time. The price of the book is worth this "chapter" alone.