Bombs Away, John Steinbeck
Bombs Away, John Steinbeck
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Bombs Away
The Story of a Bomber Team

Author: John Steinbeck

Narrator: Scott Aiello

Unabridged: 4 hr 36 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 04/05/2016


Synopsis

A magnificent volume of short novels and an essential World War II report from one of America's great twentieth-century writers

A Penguin Classic

On the heels of the enormous success of his masterwork The Grapes of Wrath and at the height of the American war effort John Steinbeck, one of the most prolific and influential literary figures of his generation, wrote Bombs Away, a nonfiction account of his experiences with U.S. Army Air Force bomber crews during World War II. Now, for the first time since its original publication in 1942, Penguin Classics presents this exclusive edition of Steinbeck's introduction to the then-nascent U.S. Army Air Force and its bomber crew--the essential core unit behind American air power that Steinbeck described as "the greatest team in the world."

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

About The Author

John Steinbeck, born in Salinas, California, in 1902, grew up in a fertile agricultural valley, about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast. Both the valley and the coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929). After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two California books, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later collected in The Long Valley (1938). Popular success and financial security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935), stories about Monterey’s paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the California laboring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the book considered by many his finest, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The Grapes of Wrath won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1939.Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with The Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious student of marine biology with Sea of Cortez (1941). He devoted his services to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play-novelette The Moon is Down (1942). Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (1948), another experimental drama, Burning Bright (1950), and The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951) preceded publication of the monumental East of Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family’s history. The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he traveled widely. Later books include Sweet Thursday (1954), The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957), Once There Was a War (1958), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), America and Americans (1966), and the posthumously published Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969), Viva Zapata! (1975), The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976), and Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (1989). Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, and, in 1964, he was presented with the United States Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Steinbeck died in New York in 1968. Today, more than thirty years after his death, he remains one of America's greatest writers and cultural figures.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Deacon Tom on May 22, 2022

I enjoyed this book. It gave positive praise to the “team” that flew bombers. Well written and descriptive in a pure Steinbeck fashion.......more

Goodreads review by Charles on November 07, 2013

Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team by John Steinbeck. (Penguin Classic, 156 pages, paper, 1942) Never heard of Bombs Away by Steinbeck? (Neither had I. I found this at the Johnson City Public Library book sale.) Probably because you never thought Steinbeck would write such a bias pro-military bo......more

Goodreads review by Rod on June 25, 2024

Has any propaganda ever been so powerfully and beautifully written as John Steinbeck ginning up bomber crew enlistees for the U.S. Army Air Force in 1942? Talk about bringing the big guns to bear! So, yeah, nobelist John FRIGGING Steinbeck tells us what the members of a bomber crew do and propounds o......more

Goodreads review by Falina on August 16, 2016

I didn't really expect to like Bombs Away--it's a propaganda novel, and I'm not American, I'm not in the middle of a war, and I know that the details described are so outdated that they must have very little modern relevance. However, despite all this, the book turned out to be fascinating. I liked......more

Goodreads review by Paul on April 07, 2012

Be advised, if you read Bombs Away, that you will not find it to be the "typical" John Steinbeck book -- if indeed there is such a thing. It is not an epic novel like The Grapes of Wrath or East of Eden, nor is it a short tale on the order of Cannery Row, Of Mice and Men, or The Pearl. Rather, Bombs......more


Quotes

By the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature