Tortilla Flat, John Steinbeck
Tortilla Flat, John Steinbeck
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Tortilla Flat

Author: John Steinbeck

Narrator: John McDonough

Unabridged: 7 hr 3 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 04/13/2011


Synopsis

"Steinbeck is an artist; and he tells stories of these lovable thieves and adulterers with a gentle and poetic purity of heart and of prose."--New York Herald Tribune

Adopting the structure and themes of the Arthurian legend, Steinbeck created a Camelot on a shabby hillside above the town of Monterey, California, and peopled it with a colorful band of knights. At the center of the tale is Danny, whose house, like Arthur's castle, becomes a gathering place for men looking for adventure, camaraderie, and a sense of belonging--men who fiercely resist the corrupting tide of honest toil and civil rectitude. As Steinbeck chronicles their deeds--their multiple lovers, their wonderful brawls, their Rabelaisian wine-drinking--he spins a tale as compelling and ultimately as touched by sorrow as the famous legends of the Round Table, which inspired him.

About The Author

John Steinbeck, born in Salinas, California, in 1902, grew up in a fertile agricultural valley, about 25 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.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 30 years after his death, he remains one of America's greatest writers and cultural figures.John McDonough is an audiobook narrator who has narrated a number of books including Come Rain or Come Shine, In This Mountain, Light from Heaven, A New Song, Somewhere Safe with Somebody Good, and Tortilla Flat. In addition to his narration, he has performed with Garrison Keillor and on television on the Fox network.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Roddy

I learned from this book that I continue to love Steinbeck. I despise the idea that he (like hemmingway for that matter) is sometimes considered a "simple" writer. Here's my opinion: Using flowery prose to add weight and impart meaning on a vaporous story is not great literature. A substantive story......more

Goodreads review by Vit

John Steinbeck paints his aquarelle of lush colours and poetic kindness in bold strokes. Tortilla Flat is a case of the meek inheriting the earth – some are meek in the head, some are meek in their moral attitudes and some have other kinds of meekness… Teresina was a mildly puzzled woman, as far as he......more

‘Things that happen are of no importance. But from everything that happens, there is a lesson to be learned.’ In his youth, Nobel Prize winning author John Steinbeck was enamoured with Thomas Malory’s The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, saying reading the book developed ‘my sense of right......more

Goodreads review by Justin

This early Steinbeck novel has the signature style that eventually made him one of the greatest writers of all time, but it never quite moved me like all his later works. I think the flaws have to do with he fact that the characters are unable to develop beyond caricature. We understand the “type” o......more


Quotes

By the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

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)"