Today, nearly forty years after his death, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck remains one of America’s greatest writers and cultural figures. Over the next year, his many works published as black-spine Penguin Classics for the first time and will feature eye-catching, newly commissioned art.

Penguin Classics is proud to present these seminal works to a new generation of readers—and to the many who revisit them again and again. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

A story of classic simplicity, based on a mexican folk tale, the pearl explores the secrets of man's nature, the darkest depths of evil, and the luminous possibilities of love.