JOHN STEINBECK SIGNS A BEAUTIFUL FIRST EDITION OF HIS FAMOUS WORK, ‘THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT’

The Winter of Our Discontent is John Steinbeck’s last novel, published in 1961.

First edition, presentation edition of Steinbeck’s final novel, one of only 500 examples with only a few known inscribed examples, which along with The Grapes of Wrath are considered his masterpieces. Octavo, original cloth. Association copy, inscribed and signed on the front free endpaper by John Steinbeck to engineer, adventurer and scientist, Willard Bascom and his wife, Rhoda. Steinbeck wrote about Bascom and his work with ‘Project Mohole’, an attempt in the early 1960s to drill through the Earth’s crust, in an article that appeared in the April 14, 1961 issue of Life Magazine. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Elmer Hader. Lettering by Jeanyee Wong. Photograph by William Ward Beecher.  An exceptional association.

In awarding John Steinbeck the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel committee stated that with The Winter of Our Discontent, he had resumed his position as an independent expounder of the truth, with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American. Ethan Allen Hawley, the protagonist of Steinbeck’s last novel, works as a clerk in a grocery store that his family once owned. With Ethan no longer a member of Long Islandâs aristocratic class, his wife is restless, and his teenage children are hungry for the tantalizing material comforts he cannot provide. Then one day, in a moment of moral crisis, Ethan decides to take a holiday from his own scrupulous standards. Set in Steinbeck’s contemporary 1960 America, the novel explores the tenuous line between private and public honesty, and today ranks alongside his most acclaimed works of penetrating insight into the American condition.