Zapata - Softcover

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.

Robert E. Morsberger is a professor emeritus of English at California State Polytechnic University.

Steinbeck was nominated for an Academy Award in 1952 for his screenplay, Viva Zapata! The film, based on the life of Mexican peasant revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, stars Marlon Brando, Anthony Quinn, and Jean Peters and is the only original work Steinbeck wrote for the screen. The original story upon which Steinbeck based his script was recently uncovered in a UCLA research library. The two versions are presented together here, and they complement each other well. The original story is more of a preliminary treatment and differs substantially from the screenplay. Steinbeck, who was fluent in Spanish, spent years in research, collecting oral histories from Zapata's contemporaries and veterans of the revolution and obtaining information not available in any other written record. His screenplay is superb drama on its own and is enriched by the historical framework. Recommended for academic libraries and large film collections.
- Marianne Cawley, Kingwood Branch Lib., Tex.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.