"A stunning, lyrical coming-of-age novel set in the rolling foothills of the Appalachians in which a young girl, with only the compass of her father's imagination, must navigate racism, sexism, and the dark secrets that will haunt her for the rest of her life. "A girl comes of age against the knife." So begins the story of Betty Carpenter. Born in a bathtub in Arkansas in 1954 to a Cherokee father and white mother, Betty is the sixth of eight siblings....

Tracing the social and political developments leading to the Dust Bowl, Owens clearly explains how the novel represents Steinbeck's indictment of the Promised Land myth.

A happy-go-lucky West Virginia mountain family moves to a ranch in California's San Fernando Valley. Grampa Amos McCoy is a porch-rockin', gol-darnin', consarnin' old codger with a wheezy voice who loves to meddle in other people's affairs -- neighbors and kin alike.

Her idyllic teen years on a British Columbia dairy farm with her mother and brother irrevocably changed by the arrival of a draft dodger, Natalie Ward remembers years later the impact he had on the morals and beliefs of their community.

From the Publisher: This second volume in The Library of America's authoritative edition of John Steinbeck features his acknowledged masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath. Written in an incredibly compressed five-month period, the novel had an electrifying impact upon publication in 1939, unleashing a political storm with its vision of America's dispossessed struggling for survival. It continues to exert a powerful influence on American culture, and has...