John Steinbeck - Sweet Thursday

PENGUIN CLASSICS

SWEET THURSDAY

JOHN STEINBECK (19021968) was born in Salinas, California, in 1902, and grew up in a fertile agricultural valley about twenty-five miles from the Pacific coastand both valley and 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 a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City and then as a caretaker for a Lake Tahoe estate, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929). After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two California fictions, 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 Montereys paisanos . A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. The 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). Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with The Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious student of marine biology with Sea of Cortez (1941). He devoted his ser vices to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play-novelette The Moon Is Down (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 Sea of Cortez (1951) preceded publication of the monumental East of Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own familys 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 Thursday (1954), The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957), Once There Was a 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 East 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.

ROBERT DEMOTT, recipient of the 2006 Trustees Award from the National Steinbeck Center, is the Edwin and Ruth Kennedy Distinguished Professor at Ohio University, the author of Steinbecks Typewriter , an award-winning book of critical essays, and the editor of Working Days , a New York Times Notable Book. He lives in Athens, Ohio.

Introduction by
ROBERT DEMOTT

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First published in the United States of America by The Viking Press 1954
Published in Penguin Books 1979
This edition with an introduction by Robert DeMott published 2008

Copyright John Steinbeck, 1954
Copyright renewed Elaine A. Steinbeck, Thom Steinbeck, and John Steinbeck IV, 1982
Introduction copyright Robert DeMott, 2008
All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Steinbeck, John, 19021968.
Sweet Thursday / John Steinbeck; introduction by Robert DeMott.
p. cm.(Penguin classics)
Sequel to: Cannery Row.
Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN: 978-1-4406-3549-6

1. Monterey (Calif.)Fiction. I. Title.
PS3537.T3234S9 2008
813'.52dc22 2008016040

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For
ELIZABETH
with love