The Wayward Bus, John Steinbeck
The Wayward Bus, John Steinbeck
3 Rating(s)
List: $20.00 | Sale: $14.00
Club: $10.00

The Wayward Bus

Author: John Steinbeck

Narrator: Richard Poe

Unabridged: 9 hr 14 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 07/14/2015


Synopsis

In his first novel to follow the publication of his enormous success, The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck’s vision comes wonderfully to life in this imaginative and unsentimental chronicle of a bus traveling California’s back roads, transporting the lost and the lonely, the good and the greedy, the stupid and the scheming, the beautiful and the vicious away from their shattered dreams and, possibly, toward the promise of the future. This edition features an introduction by Gary Scharnhorst.

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 karen on June 23, 2018

steinbeck pulverizes me. i'm not the type to get choked up by calling-card commercials or whose heart swells with the violins at the end of a sappy movie, but steinbeck has a heart-seeking missile aimed directly at me, and he knows just how to find my emotional center. this has always been my favori......more

Goodreads review by Vit on October 31, 2024

The Wayward Bus isn’t the best novel in John Steinbeck’s oeuvre but there is something charming in it. Man is a transitory being, and life is a journey, and we all ride in the same huge bus of the world… Louie went back toward the front. His eyes had caught a girl coming in from the street. She was ca......more

Goodreads review by mark on April 06, 2018

i saw Dusty reading this and asked him what it was all about. he said it was hard to say, it was about life and people and what a countertop looks like and what a place feels like and how people think or not-think. at least i imagine that's what he said, its been a month or so. he also said that Ste......more

Goodreads review by Sam on February 25, 2017

John Steinbeck is one of my favourite writers. The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, East of Eden - masterpieces all. Even his less “important” novels like Cannery Row and its sequel Sweet Thursday, as well as his nonfiction book, Travels with Charley, where he goes on an RV tour of America with his......more


Quotes

By the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature