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  Table of Contents

Championship Page

Copyright Folio

Introduction

Dedication

Role ONE

Affiliate ONE

CHAPTER Two

Chapter THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

Chapter FIVE

Affiliate Half-dozen

CHAPTER Seven

Chapter 8

Affiliate NINE

CHAPTER Ten

PART TWO

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER Thirteen

Affiliate FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER Xvi

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER Twenty

CHAPTER Twenty-1

Affiliate TWENTY-Two

Explanatory Notes

THE STORY OF PENGUIN CLASSICS

PENGUIN

CLASSICS

THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT

JOHN STEINBECK (1902-68) was born in Salinas, California, in 1902 and grew upwards in a fertile agricultural valley near twenty-five miles from the Pacific Declension--and both valley and declension would serve every bit 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 a caste. During the adjacent five years, he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York Metropolis and then as a flagman for a Lake Tahoe manor, all the time working on his beginning novel, Cup of Gilded (1929). After spousal relationship and a motility to Pacific Grove, he published ii California fictions, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later nerveless in The Long Valley (1938). Popular success and financial security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935), stories most Monterey's paisanos. A incessant experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck inverse courses regularly. The powerful novels of the tardily 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). Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with The Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious educatee of marine biology with Bounding main of Cortez (1941). He devoted his services to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play-novelette The Moon Is Downward (1942). Cannery Row (1945); The Wayward Bus (1947); The Pearl (1947); A Russian Journal (1948); another experimental drama, Burning Bright (1950); and The Log from the "Bounding main of Cortez" (1951) preceded publication of the monumental East of Eden (1952), an aggressive 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 Th (1954), The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957), In one case At that place Was a State of 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 "Eastward 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). He died in 1968, having won a Nobel Prize in 1962.

SUSAN SHILLINGLAW is a professor of English at San Jose Country University and scholar-in-residence at the National Steinbeck Eye in Salinas. She has published several articles on Steinbeck and coedited Steinbeck and the Surround, John Steinbeck: The Contemporary Reviews, and "America and Americans" and Selected Nonfiction. Her almost recent book is A Journey into Steinbeck's California. She is completing a biography of Steinbeck'south first wife, Carol Henning Steinbeck.

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First published in the United States of America by The Viking Press 1961

Published in Penguin Books 1982

This edition with an introduction and notes by Susan Shillinglaw published 2008

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Copyright (c) John Steinbeck, 1961

Copyright renewed Elaine Steinbeck, Thom Steinbeck, and John Steinbeck Iv, 1989

Introduction and notes copyright (c) Susan Shillinglaw, 2008

All rights reserved

A serial version of this work appeared in McCall'south.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION Information

Steinbeck, John, 1902-1968.

The winter of our discontent / John Steinbeck; introduction and notes by Susan Shillinglaw.

p. cm.--(Penguin classics.)

Includes bibliographical references.

eISBN : 978-1-4406-3867-ane

1. Grocery merchandise--Employees--Fiction. 2. Bear of life--Fiction. iii. Domestic fiction. I. Shillinglaw,

Susan. II. Title.

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Introduction The Winter of Our Discontent is John Steinbeck's concluding novel, the book that occasioned his 1962 Nobel Prize for Literature. On the eve of the ceremony, the New York Times published an editorial by Arthur Mizener questioning the wisdom of the Swedish Academy's decision: "Does a Moral Vision of the Thirties Deserve a Nobel Prize?" The article seared Steinbeck'southward soul, no dubiousness, and placed once again earlier his American readers the enigma of his reputation. How to ascertain this most American of writers, the engaged artist of 1930s California? And how to describe this last novel, certainly not a howl of social protestation in the vein of his 1939 classic, The Grapes of Wrath, but neither the twilight reflections of an aging author. For many readers The Winter of Our Discontent is a night morality tale near the fall of a blueish-blooded American hero, Ethan Allen Hawley, who succumbs to the temptations of wealth, power, and prestige. Simply this final novel defies categories. If it'south a parable of corruption and redemption, equally Steinbeck suggests in his epigraph, information technology'due south also a lesson in Darwinian survival. The novel insists on a symbolic and highly ironic fr

amework--the outset half takes place on Easter weekend in April 1960 and the second on the Fourth of July weekend that same yr. Yet the book is also realistic, set up in Steinbeck'due south own Sag Harbor, New York--New Baytown in the novel--and influenced by the moral quagmires of gimmicky America. And while the work tips its hat to Steinbeck'due south love of the Arthurian saga, with Ethan a latter-day Lancelot, it'southward also true that Ethan'due south vocalism seems almost postmodern, speaking a language that is highly wrought, artificial, self-reflective. The Winterof Our Discontent is, seemingly, a patchwork of intentions, all meant to shake a reader's self-approbation.

Since its publication in April 1961, this "curious" novel has baffled many readers. Carlos Baker'due south review for the New York Times sounds a feature notation of dissatisfaction:

This is a trouble novel whose key problem is never fully solved, an internal disharmonize novel in which the key issue between dignity and expediency, while information technology is joined, is never satisfactorily resolved. For this reason, despite its obvious powers, The Winter of Our Discontent cannot rightly stand in the forefront of Steinbeck'due south fiction.

Far from beingness the source of the novel's creative failure, its irresolution and allusiveness are, in fact, central to its meaning. "If this is a time of defoliation," Steinbeck had written a few years earlier, "might it be best to set that down?" That was his challenge in The Winter of Our Discontent. Ambiguous threads and ethical knots are woven into each page of the narrative--and credible in the outset pages, starting with the perplexities of Ethan'due south ancestral heritage, part pirate, part Puritan, and his own name, Ethan Allen, both a Revolutionary War patriot and a man charged with treason. After two chapters in each section of the novel'due south two sections, point of view switches from 3rd to kickoff person.

Indeed, the text's evasive strategies and perplexing characters suggest Steinbeck's profound unease with Cold War America, where his real fear for his country centered not on Sputnik and Russian armament just on "a creeping, all-pervading, nerve-gas of immorality which starts in the nursery and does not stop before information technology reaches the highest offices, both corporate and governmental." Steinbeck sent that observation to his close friend, politician Adlai Stevenson, in November 1959, and the alphabetic character was subsequently published in Newsday, sparking a national word: The question "Are We Morally Flabby?" was debated past four educators and writers in a Feb 1960 issue of the New Democracy, and the next month Newsday published "Steinbeck Replies." Steinbeck's answer was a resounding aye, and more than annihilation else The Wintertime of Our Discontent explores the contours of that affirmative response. From 1960, when he equanimous this novel, to the end of his life eight years subsequently, Steinbeck stood equally America's moral compass, pointing to Americans' virtues and lapses in three unflinching books: The Winter of Our Discontent, Travels with Charley (1962), and America and Americans (1966).

The freedom to critique i'due south country, he felt with increasing urgency, was the role of the creative person in a free nation. Trips to the Soviet Union in 1937, 1947, and 1963 as well as charges made by Communist writers that he had moved politically to the correct crystallized his independent stance--Steinbeck's Common cold War was a "Duel Without Pistols" (a 1952 commodity he wrote in Italy after being attacked in a Communist newspaper for not objecting to the "degeneracy and brutality of American soldiers" in Korea). While American citizens and artists could phonation opinions freely, he wrote, Communist artists were constrained by orthodoxy. Speak as an American critic he would, to the cease of his days. That defiant patriotism informs The Winter of Our Discontent. In effect, Ethan Allen Hawley, his primal graphic symbol, asserts his own liberty to speak out and, in the procedure, replaces a hollow cocky with a more authentic cocky, however morally imperiled. What makes information technology such a quirky and important book is that it suggests, through Ethan'due south phonation, the simmering discontent of its time, the cacophony and dislocation of Cold War America, overtly a superpower, internally super powerless.

I. Understanding JOHN STEINBECK'Due south DISCONTENT

"A novel may exist said to be the man who writes it."

( John Steinbeck to Elizabeth Otis and Hunt Horton, Apr 1957)

With a particular man in mind, Thomas Malory, John Steinbeck wrote this in 1957, one year into his iii-year investigation of this fifteenth-century author of Le Morte d'Arthur, his era, Arthur's Camelot, and Heart English manuscripts. Such layered agreement was essential, he thought, before attempting his own translation of Malory'south Arthur into mod English. But the aforementioned sentence might be written about Steinbeck himself: The Winter of Our Discontent is the restless man who wrote it. A decade-long winter of discontent is, in several senses, his own. And the project he put bated in the fall of 1959, his modern translation of Malory, informs the groundwork of his final novel.

Steinbeck's discontent, however, was artistic and cultural, not personal. The yr 1950 was a watershed; he moved permanently from California, his birthplace, to New York City in December 1949, and a year subsequently he married his third wife, Elaine Scott. This marriage gave him far more stability than the first two--certainty of dear shared with a cocky-confident woman. Once an assistant phase manager on Broadway (for Oklahoma! when it opened), Elaine stepped into her new matrimony with style, energy, wit, and steady dearest. For their 18 years of wedlock, she kept much of the world at bay. Some qualities of Steinbeck's happy marriage to Elaine make their way into The Winter of Our Discontent--certainly the solidity of the union (this is, in fact, the only Steinbeck book that opens with a bedchamber scene). Ethan'south rather cloying nicknames for Mary are close to Steinbeck'southward ain for his dearest Elaine, who was "moglie" when they traveled and "Lily Maid" at home. Most of import, the steady calorie-free that Mary casts for Ethan is Elaine'south for John: "No one in the world can rise to a party or a plateau of celebration like my Mary," Ethan muses. "With Mary in the doorway of a party anybody feels more attractive and clever than he was, and and then he actually becomes." The marriage of Ethan and Mary is Steinbeck'south most fully fatigued portrait of spousal relationship and abode life--at least in part an alphabetize of his own contentment.

With an equal sense of renewal, this displaced Californian embraced his and Elaine's new domicile, New York Urban center, and made it his own: "Equally far as homes go," he wrote in a 1953 essay, "Autobiography: Making of a New Yorker," "in that location is just a pocket-sized California town and New York. . . . All of everything is concentrated hither, population, theater, art, writing, publishing, importing, business concern, murder, mugging, luxury, poverty. Information technology is all of everything. Information technology goes all night. It is tireless and its air is charged with energy. I tin work longer and harder without weariness in New York than anyplace else." There is a kind of steely determination expressed in that essay most his new terrain. Steinbeck needed and staked personal stability. His stance equally an East Coaster was solidified farther when he and Elaine purchased a small-scale house in Sag Harbor in the spring of 1955: "We accept a petty shack on the sea out on the tip of Long Isle at Sag Harbor," he wrote to his old friend Carlton Sheffield. "It's a whaling town or was and we have a small boat and lots of oak copse and the telephone never rings. Nosotros run at that place whenever nosotros demand a rest--no neighbors, and fish and clams and venereal and mussels right at the door step." Sag Harbor was Steinbeck'southward haven and the setting for New Baytown, the village where Ethan lives in one of the erstwhile whalers' houses that, in fact, line Sag Harbor'due south Primary Street and beyond. Schiavoni's Grocery, the model for Ethan'south store, has been in that family unit since the 1950s and still operates in Sag Harbor'southward tiny downtown.

Merely personal and territorial contentment was stirred first by the restlessness that was always his (and Elaine's, who would pack a suitcase willingly) and second past artistic indirection. Ethan equally store clerk, nibbled by small-scale defeats, is, in some respects, Steinbeck as compromised writer in one case he left his native soil of California. In a 1955 interview with Fine art Buchwald, Steinbeck admitted that he was "tired of my ain technique. . . . I've been highly discontented with my own work for some time. In East of Eden I used all my tricks and used them consciously and with finality." It would non be his only access of creative frustration in the 1950s. By the finish of the decade, he felt he'd written only "bits a

nd pieces" for 15 years and during that fourth dimension had "brought the writing outside." It was a harsh self-assessment for a decade that included Due east of Eden; the marvelous essay most his best friend, marine biologist Edward Flanders Ricketts, "Near Ed Ricketts" (1951); also as the frothy bits of fun Sweet Thursday (1954) and The Brusque Reign of Pippin Iv: A Fabrication (1957). But it is besides true that his writing of the 1950s was characterized, for the nigh role, past a deep split in sensibility: He wavered imaginatively between his own journalistic urge to tap into the present--writing a number of articles about contemporary civilization, political conventions, and European travel--and his deep emotional ties to California that took him back to his Salinas birthplace and Monterey'southward Cannery Row, where he'd spent most of the 1930s. Ethan'southward internal dance between past and present is a night form of Steinbeck's ain.

Like Ethan's, Steinbeck's past was a siren telephone call, voices non easily silenced. Soon afterwards moving to New York City with Elaine, Steinbeck wrote his epitaph for Ricketts, who was killed in 1948. He then considered and abandoned the thought of turning Cannery Row (1945) into a play: "I have finished that whole phase. . . . I'thou not going to go over onetime things any more than." That was written by a human being who was about to start Eastward of Eden, a man who would contemplate and brainstorm writing in Paris in 1954 a brusque-story cycle about Salinas, and a human being who would, that same year, turn Cannery Row into Sweet Thursday, a book whose characters seethe with discontent. And having finally laid to rest the Cannery Row material and Ed Ricketts'due south ghost with the 1955 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Piping Dream, he turned the side by side yr to King Arthur, hero of a beloved childhood saga.

Only in fact those Arthurian tales shadowed all his work of the late 1940s and 1950s. Again and again in his search for social club and meaning in a postwar world, he was drawn to figures who embodied the gallantry that was Arthur's, heroic individuals like Sam Hamilton in East of Eden--characters who took a moral stand up, born out of justified acrimony, and establish creative solutions: Emiliano Zapata, central figure in the moving-picture show script he wrote for Elia Kazan'southward Viva Zapata! (1952); or Don Quixote, a book he reread and in 1958 recast in an abandoned manuscript, a western, called "Don Keehan," written with Henry Fonda in mind. In 1947 he wrote a play-novelette about Joan of Arc, "The Last Joan." He began one most Columbus. He considered writing one about Jesus. "Wyatt Earp, King Arthur, Apollo, Quetzalcoatl, St. George all seem to me to be the aforementioned figure," he wrote in a 1958 letter, "set up to requite help without intelligence to people distressed when the skeins of their existence get bollixed upward." For Steinbeck, gallantry countered Cold State of war complacency, graft, and heed-numbing materialism. "The western world and its so called civilisation have invented very few things," he wrote in 1953. "Simply there is one matter that we invented and for which in that location is no counterpart in the due east and that is gallantry. . . . It ways that a person, all lonely, will take on odds that by their very natures are insurmountable, will attack enemies which are unbeatable. And the crazy affair is that nosotros win often enough to make it a workable matter. And too this aforementioned gallantry gives a dignity to the individual that zippo else always has. . . ." The questions facing Steinbeck--and Ethan--are whether gallantry is an outmoded virtue in America, 1960, or whether inbound the fray, as Ethan does, might well be a quixotic kind of gallantry.

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