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3.5 

Bombs Away

By John Steinbeck & James H. Meredith
Bombs Away by John Steinbeck & James H. Meredith digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

A magnificent volume of short novels and an essential World War II report from one of America's great twentieth-century writers

A Penguin Classic


On the heels of the enormous success of his masterwork The Grapes of Wrath and at the height of the American war effort John Steinbeck, one of the most prolific and influential literary figures of his generation, wrote Bombs Away, a nonfiction account of his experiences with U.S. Army Air Force bomber crews during World War II. Now, for the first time since its original publication in 1942, Penguin Classics presents this exclusive edition of Steinbeck's introduction to the then-nascent U.S. Army Air Force and its bomber crew--the essential core unit behind American air power that Steinbeck described as "the greatest team in the world."

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

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2 Reviews

3.5
“First I should say that I would read a book which narrated paint drying if it were written by John Steinbeck. The man was a genius, narrative magician, and American master. There are very few things I know with absolute certainty, but Steinbeck's awesomeness is one of them. That being said, OF COURSE this story is a little dry. Published in 1942, the year after the attack on Pearl Harbor and America's entrance into World War II, Bombs Away is propaganda written by the writer of the American people. This man had written about Okies suffering through the Great Depression and Dust Bowl, a group of men on the California coast, and would later go on to write the allegorical story of Cain and Abel. Although some may think it dry, the reverence that Steinbeck communicates through this piece of work is genuine. He gives the story of boys from Anytown, USA and how they too could achieve greatness through the Air Force. With the use of airplanes in warfare expanding not only did a volume like this share to the boys it was trying to recruit the prestige of the Air Force, but showed the American public just exactly what the boys they were sending to war were training for. A true Steinbeck and history fan will completely adore this piece for what it is, and respect the reason it was written. (And totally want to punch Hemingway in the face for suggesting writing a story like this would somehow be construed as shameful.)”

About John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck, born in Salinas, California, in 1902, grew up in a fertile agricultural valley, about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast. Both the valley and the 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 taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929).
 
After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two California books, 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 Monterey’s paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Three 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). The Grapes of Wrath won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 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 services to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play-novelette The Moon is Down (1942).Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (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 family’s 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).
 
Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, and, in 1964, he was presented with the United States Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Steinbeck died in New York in 1968. Today, more than thirty years after his death, he remains one of America's greatest writers and cultural figures. 

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