The Wayward Bus (First UK Edition)

A transitional work in Steinbeck's career, bridging his wartime writing and his mature postwar fiction, and a novel that, despite a lukewarm critical reception on publication, proved more commercially successful than anything he had written before it.

John Steinbeck dedicated The Wayward Bus to "Gwyn," his second wife Gwyndolyn Conger, and set its epigraph from the medieval morality play Everyman, a choice that signals the novel's concern with the transitory nature of human life. The story follows a disparate group of passengers thrown together aboard a broken-down bus somewhere in rural California, their individual dreams, frustrations, and petty desperations forming a composite portrait of ordinary postwar American life. Though regarded at the time of publication as one of Steinbeck's lesser efforts, the novel sold more copies than any of his earlier books, and later criticism has come to view it as a significant transitional work, standing between the more overtly political fiction that made Steinbeck's reputation in the 1930s and the more personal, reflective novels of his later career.

First UK edition. Octavo. [vi], 254pp. Original red cloth boards. Original dust jacket, clipped. Toning to inner jacket faces and throughout contents. Some very minor spotting along fore-edge. A very good copy.

This book is currently not on display in store.
If you would like more information or to arrange a viewing, please contact: rarebooks@harryhartog.com.au

Catalogue Number: HH000871