I'm really at a loss as what to say about this incredible novel except that it is American storytelling at its best.

Evanescence of Morality Maybe it's my age where I find myself amidst a thousand questions because I like to think that I am understanding a little of what goes around. And as it goes with books, the count of unanswered questions is on an exponential run. Anyway, the most prominent and adamant question I find myself wrestle with these days is 'Morality'. The realms of it, the undefined criss cross intersecting patterns of it, the lawlessness and sometimes the hypocritical pride of it, and last

‘Money is not nice. Money got no friends but more money.’Every year in late winter, when profoundly discontent with the snow that keeps falling, I find myself thinking of this book, the final novel of the great American novelist John Steinbeck. The Winter of our Discontent, the title from Shakespeare’s Richard III, is a moral allegory with Steinbeck questioning if personal ethics are valued on the grand scale of society, and if the American dream with its offer of prosperity and property becomes...

The brilliance of John Steinbeck intimidates me. I spend a great deal of my time while reading his books nodding my head in agreement and gasping in awe at how he tackles the profound and the everyday with the same amount of elan.First off, I enjoyed this story. I cared about Ethan Allen Hawley, and not just his person but his soul. I wanted him to emerge unscathed even though I knew he could not, because no one can compromise his own morality and remain unsoiled. I cried for what I knew was his...

I fell in love with Ethan Allen Hawley upon first meeting him. What a character! He is the town's nice guy, comedian and moral center. But he works as a grocer for a store that used to belong to him. He feels that his family was cheated out of it's riches (by someone burning their ship.) As events proceed and he is tempted over and over again to make more money the idea begins to sound better and better to him and slowly his moral compass turns. I still rooted for him though I was increasingly s...

Don't pass this one up in your choosing which Steinbeck book to consume my hungry rabble. I had no expectations of this wonderful little story and now it is one of my favorites. Give yourself for a few hours for there is much to take from Ethan and all Steinbeck's creation. Crestfallen to come to it's end, as it is with most of his work. “Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this son of York…” 

I think I have a crush on John Steinbeck. But even if I met him somewhere -- a cocktail party, a barbeque, even my own bookstore -- I don't think I'd talk to him. Maybe make eye contact in a brave and silent way. Sometimes I get the feeling that he is friendly and easy-going, compassionate and kind, and really interested in people in general and persons in particular ... but I know that he is deeply brilliant, and I would say something ridiculous that I would turn over and over in my head (menta...

The Winter of Our Discontent is the grand finale of John Steinbeck's fictitious creation. Deriving the title from William Shakespeare's Richard III opening lines "Now is the winter of our discontent, Made glorious summer by this sun of York", the story is somewhat a psychological analysis into a man's moral dilemma of doing what is right and doing whatever it takes for him to become successful. As Gloucester in Richard III, Ethan Allen Hawley in Steinbeck's novel hopes for better times, as he ha...

“And when they had platted a crown of thorns, they put it upon his head, and a reed in his right hand: and they bowed the knee before him, and mocked him, saying, Hail, King of the Jews!” Matthew 27:29A man will rise… A man will fall…The Winter of Our Discontent is about guilty conscience.The Winter of Our Discontent is about the nature of fortune and misfortune.Now I was on the edge of the minefield. My heart hardened against my selfless benefactor. I felt it harden and grow wary and dangerous....

East of Eden was 600 some-odd pages and I didn't want it to end. This didn't reach 300 and it could not end soon enough. There was just nothing good about this; I can’t believe this is a Steinbeck work. Moreover, not the work of a budding author still perfecting his craft, but an author who was in the winter of his profession, having already penned Of Mice and Men, Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden and countless other works. The story is about Ethan Hawley, a man of noble ancestry reduced to a groce...

Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent was first published in 1961 and was his last novel.It was also the latest book published prior to his winning the 1962 Nobel Prize for literature. Interestingly, when asked if he felt that he deserved the award, this “giant of American letters” said: “Frankly, no.” Further, recent archives revealed that Steinbeck was a “compromise choice” for the award amidst a group described as “a bad lot”. Although the committee believed Steinbeck's best work was behin...

I was forwarded a blog post recently (written by someone much sharper than me) that asked where our contemporary John Steinbecks have gone. The masterful fiction dedicated to the minimum wage worker, the family displaced by the Great Recession living out of a motel room, or anyone living from paycheck to paycheck seems largely extinct from the bestseller lists. Hard luck stories about average American families fill newspapers, while in fiction, it seems like world building, not world reporting,

When I started reading this, the last novel written by John Steinbeck, I initially thought that I wasn’t going to like it. The prose was as fine as I expected it to be, but it seemed such a small story, compared to powerful epics like The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden. However, the story grew on me as I read and the ending packed a punch. Mostly in the form of a first person narrative, the novel is about Ethan Hawley, a likeable man in his late thirties, married to a woman he loves and the fa...

This is a great story. So well told. It’s story telling at its absolute best.

Rating: 6* of fiveThe Publisher Says: 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 Island’s 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...

John Steinbeck's The Winter of our Discontent is a study of morality in the individual and in the community. Set in a New England town where everyone knows everyone else's business and history, Ethan Hawley narrates his experience with the various moral temptations one season offers him. Under pressure from associates and his own family, Ethan becomes increasingly dissatisfied with his diminished station in life and begins to consider a brief transformation, a temporary suspension of his identit...

John Steinbeck's last novel and it shows when an author pontificates his views to the readers he becomes not a writer anymore but a preacher. Disappointed in life Steinbeck tries to convey his dark feelings to the rest of the world even if they aren't too interested...there are many others, nevertheless a great novel which few scribblers could match. Ethan Allen Hawley (named after famous Revolutionary War hero) has a comfortable but ordinary existence a loving , loyal , pretty wife Mary two tro...

“Everybody steals. Everybody does it.”The title of this novel, The Winter of Our Discontent, comes from the first two lines of William Shakespeare's Richard III: "Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun [or son] of York"; the book focuses on one dark period in the life of one (American) man and his family in a small Long Island town in the late fifties. The Winter of Our Discontent is a moral allegory colored by righteous rage about capitalism and what seems like w...

There is a certain emotion in Steinbeck I have not found in other authors. Faulkner comes close, Hemingway a bit further off, perhaps Woolf is on a parallel path. Steinbeck shows us something into ourselves, he states in the book that we all have our own light, we are not a bonfire. We only understand others to the point that we assume they are akin to ourselves. Steinbeck, like Woolf in the Waves, shows us that we are all connected, and that we can find a path in this world through this novel.

I learned a lesson about why I should finish books, even if the story does not grip me and I find the protagonist boring. (Thanks, book club) Initially, I thought... oh man... middle aged man making bitter jokes out of his miserable life. I felt sorry for his wife. However, as I realized what was happening as I got farther and farther into the book, I found myself wishing there was a sequel because I want to know what happened to Ethan a year or two down the road. Was he able to live with himsel...