John Steinbeck Novels

I have recently finished reading John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” and “The

Pearl”. These two and many other of Steinbeck’s books have a couple of things in

common. The first thing is that they are all about poor people/families. The second thing

is that they are almost always terribly sad in the end. The third thing they share is that I

enjoy each one very much. I have never read a book by John Steinbeck that I did not like,

even though his books do not exactly cheer me up.

“The Pearl” is about a poor man named Kino, his wife Juana, and their baby boy

Coyotito. Kino is a pearl diver, but since there are so many other pearl divers where he

lives, he very rarely finds any valuable pearls. In the very beginning of the book, Coyotito

gets stung by a scorpion and becomes very ill. Since Kino and his family are very poor,

they cannot afford to get Coyotito a doctor. The very next day, Kino finds a pearl beyond

his wildest dreams. Word spreads through the town about Kino’s amazing pearl and the

pearl buyers make a deal with each other to offer Kino very little for his pearl. The

doctor, however, thought that kino would soon have enough money to pay for his son’s

cure, so the doctor cured Coyotito. The next day, when Kino went to town to sell his

pearl, he refused to give it to the pearl buyers for such a small amount of money. After a

few attempts by unknown people to steal the pearl at night, Kino killed an intruder to his

home in the night. They knew they had to run away and they did. They were extremely

careful, but they were still unable to elude the people searching for them. One night, as Kino was trying to get rid of the people hunting them, one of the “hunters” shot and killed

Coyotito. That is how the book ended.

“The Grapes of Wrath” was a much longer book, once again about a poor family

in the depression, the Joads. The Joads were a farming family from Oklahoma before

they were kicked off their land by the bank. They were given a handbill by someone

telling them that there was work out in California, so they sold all of their possessions to

get enough money to buy an old, beat up, used car. Then, Tom, Pa, Ma, Ruthie, Winfield,

Grampa, Granma, Uncle John, Rose of Sharon, Al, the preacher Casy, Connie, Noah, and

all of the Joads remaining things were piled into the old Jalopy and off they went toward

California. While on the road they encountered many struggles and losses including the

death of Granma and Grampa