The Wayward Bus

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, beginning with the six shown here, will be published as black-spine Penguin Classics for the first time and will feature eye-catching, newly commissioned art. Of this initial group of six titles, The Wayward Bus is in a new edition. An imaginative and unsentimental chronicle of a bus travelling California's back roads. This allegorical novel of pilgrimage includes a new introduction by Gary Scharnhorst. 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.

JOHN STEINBECK (1902-û1968) was born in Salinas, California. He worked as a laborer and a journalist, and in 1935, when he published Tortilla Flat, he achieved popular success and financial security. Steinbeck wrote more than twenty-five novels and won the Nobel Prize in 1962.
Robert DeMott is the Edwin and Ruth Kennedy Distinguished Professor at Ohio University and the author of Steinbeck-'s Typewriter, an award-winning book of critical essays.
Gary Scharnhorst is professor of English at the University of New Mexico. He is the editor of books by Bret Harte and John De Forest for Penguin Classics.