The Short Reign of Pippin IV, John Steinbeck
The Short Reign of Pippin IV, John Steinbeck
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The Short Reign of Pippin IV
A Fabrication

Author: John Steinbeck

Narrator: Jefferson Mays

Unabridged: 4 hr 39 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 01/19/2016


Synopsis

In his only work of political satire, The Short Reign of Pippin IV, John Steinbeck turns the French Revolution upside down as amateur astronomer Pippin Héristal is drafted to rule the unruly French. Steinbeck creates around the infamous Pippin the most hilarious royal court ever: Pippin’s wife, Queen Marie, who “might have taken her place at the bar of a very good restaurant”; his uncle, a man of dubious virtue; his glamour-struck daughter and her beau, the son of the so-called “egg king” of Petaluma, California; and a motley crew of courtiers and politicians, guards and gardeners. This edition includes an introduction by Robert Morsberger and Katharine Morsberger.

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 Julian

Well-written satire that is still as funny today as it was when it was published. I believe this is Steinbeck's only satirical novel and although it does poke fun at French politics, there's more to it than that. The book, a fabrication in case you weren't sure, is about Pippin Héristal, an amateur a......more

Goodreads review by Fátima

#JulhoNobel Em Fevereiro de 19... um homem delicado, curioso, vivia numa casinha da Avenida de Marigny com a mulher e a filha, o seu terraço e o seu telescópio, as suas galochas e o seu guarda-chuva, e carregando sempre consigo a sua pasta. Tinha o seu dentista, o seu seguro, e algum crédito no Crédi......more

Goodreads review by Wayne

This is Steinbeck's only satirical work and if I may say so, he pulled it off quite nicely. It's a political piece, a subject in which he is knowledgeable, but instead of the darker, dramatic side of the topic that he has always portrayed, John gives us the scenario in a way that we can laugh at. Wh......more

Goodreads review by Fábio

Límpido e conciso como Steinbeck costuma ser, balanceia com leveza algumas das suas preocupações sociais e humanitárias de sempre. É um pequeno livro,tardio na sua carreira,que nem por sombras desmerece a sua tremenda obra. Não sou particularmente sensível ao humor,no sentido em que as peripécias ma......more


Quotes

Enchanting satirical comedy . . . highly amusing . . . entrancing. (Saturday Review)