Vividly depicts the colorful, sometimes disreputable, inhabitants of a run-down area in Monterey, California.

The ambitions, dreams, failings, and innermost thoughts of a diverse group of passengers are revealed as they travel aboard a bus along the backroads of California.

In "The Short Reign of Pippin IV," John Steinbeck turns the French Revolution upside down as amateur astronomer Pippin Hristal is drafted to rule the unruly French. Steinbeck creates around the infamous Pippin the most hilarious royal court ever: Pippins wife, Queen Marie, who might have taken her place at the bar of a very good restaurant; his uncle, a man of dubious virtue; his glamour-struck daughter and her beau, the son of the so-called egg king...

Soon after Joseph Wayne follows his dead father's dream of starting a farm, he begins to believe his father's spirit occupies a massive tree on the property. But when the tree is destroyed and drought descends on the land, Joseph finds himself spiritually adrift.

Just after the Iron Curtain fell on Eastern Europe, John Steinbeck and Robert Capa ventured into the Soviet Union to report for the New York Herald Tribune. This rare opportunity took the famous travelers not only to Moscow and Stalingrad--now Volgograd--but through the countryside of the Ukraine and the Caucasus. Hailed by the New York Times as "superb" when it first appeared in 1948, this work is the distillation of their journey and remains a remarkable...