<DIV>This third volume in The Library of America's authoritative edition of <b>John Steinbeck</b>'s writings shows one of America's most enduring popular writers continuing restlessly to explore new subject matter and new approaches to storytelling. <br><br> <b>The Moon Is Down</b> (1942), set in an unnamed Scandinavian country under German occupation, dramatizes the transformation of ordinary life under totalitarian rule and the underground struggle against the Nazi invaders. In <b>Cannery Row</b> (1945) Steinbeck paid tribute to his closest friend, the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, in the central character of Doc, proprietor of the Western Biological Laboratory and spiritual and financial mainstay of a cast of philosophical drifters and hangers-on. The comic and bawdy evocation of the main street of Monterey's sardine-canning district has made this one of the most popular of all Steinbeck's novels. Steinbeck's long involvement with Mexican culture is distilled in <b>The Pearl</b> (1947). Expanding on an anecdote he had heard about a boy who found a pearl of unusual size, Steinbeck turned it into an allegory of the corrupting influence of sudden wealth. <b>The Pearl</b> appears here with the original illustrations by Jos&eacute Clemente Orozco. <br><br> Ambitious in scale and original in structure, <b>East of Eden</b> (1952) recounts the violent and emotionally turbulent history of a Salinas Valley family through several generations. Drawing on Biblical parallels, <b>East of Eden</b> is an epic that explores the writer's deepest and most anguished concerns within a landscape that for him had mythic resonance. </div>