The Winter of Our Discontent published in 1961, is John Steinbeck's last novel. The title is a reference to the line "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son [or sun] of York," from William Shakespeare's Richard III. The story revolves around New Englander Ethan Allen Hawley, who works as a clerk in a grocery store he used to own. His wife and children resent their lowly social and economic position, and don't put any value in the high levels of honesty and integrity that Ethan struggles to maintain in a corrupt society. Under this constant pressure, Hawley will eventually manage to get back the store by renouncing his morals, but the new-found wealth will not bring happiness.
John Steinbeck (1902 – 1968) was unarguably one of the best American writers of the 20th century. A winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, he is best known for his novella “Of Mice and Men” (1937) and his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Grapes of Wrath” (1939), both of which examine the lives of the working class and the migrant worker during the Great Depression. Steinbeck wrote in the naturalist style, portraying people as the center of his stories. His characters and his stories were taken from real life struggles in the first half of the 20th century. His body of work reflects his wide range of interests, including marine biology, jazz, politics, philosophy, history, and myth. Seventeen of his works, including “Cannery Row” and “The Pearl”, went on to become Hollywood films, and Steinbeck himself succeeded as a Hollywood writer, garnering an Academy Award nomination for Best Writing for Alfred Hitchcock's “Lifeboat”, in 1945. Steinbeck is also known as a regionalist, naturalist, mystic, proletarian writer, moved to anger by the brutality of the Depression.
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