Steinbeck John

1947 · ref. 152649 — New York: The Viking Press 1947. First edition of this classic work by the Nobel Prize-winning writer a novel about a busload of lost souls on the back roads of California. Octavo original cloth. With a full page inscription by Steinbeck on the front free endpaper written in Spanish with a closing line in Latin the inscription reads in translation “The first title of this book was El Camión Vacilador. It is very difficult to translate this title. It means: we are puppets and we are hoping! I hope! John Steinbeck. Pray for us now and in the hour of our death. J.S.” This inscription is a remarkable piece of Steinbeck bibliographic history. The Wayward Bus was John Steinbeck's first novel following his Nobel Prize-era masterworks a sprawling allegorical narrative set aboard a broken-down bus carrying a cross-section of American travelers through the California backcountry that Steinbeck conceived as a modern American equivalent of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The inscription in this copy reveals that Steinbeck's original preferred title for the novel was El Camión Vacilador a Spanish phrase that he himself acknowledges is extremely difficult to translate precisely explaining in his own hand that it means something along the lines of "we are uncertain ones" or "we are waverers" — a concept captured in the wavering hesitating lurching motion of the bus itself as a metaphor for the moral and existential uncertainty of its passengers. The choice of a Spanish title reflects Steinbeck's deep and lifelong immersion in the culture and language of California's Mexican and Mexican-American communities a preoccupation that had informed Tortilla Flat 1935 and Cannery Row 1945 and that gave his California fiction much of its distinctive texture and voice. That Viking Press elected the more commercially accessible English title The Wayward Bus over Steinbeck's preferred Spanish original is a small but revealing episode in the history of American publishing and the author's wry inscription — closing with the Latin ora pro nobis nunc et in hora mortis "pray for us now and in the hour of our death" — suggests a characteristically mordant Steinbeck humor about the fate of titles at the hands of publishers From the library of Otis L. Guernsey Jr. 1918-2001 the distinguished American drama and film critic and for more than three decades editor of the Best Plays theatre yearbook. Guernsey spent nineteen years at the New York Herald Tribune rising from copy boy to become the paper’s film and drama critic and arts editor before taking over the Best Plays series in 1964 and editing some thirty-six annual volumes an unrivaled record of the American stage. As one of the foremost theatre critics of his generation he moved in the same New York literary and theatrical world in which Steinbeck whose novels and plays were mainstays of stage and screen loomed so large. The Wayward Bus itself would reach the screen in 1957. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Robert Hallock. A unique example regarding the history of this book from the Steinbeck's point of view. In his first novel to follow the enormous success of The Grapes of Wrath Steinbeck’s vision comes wonderfully to life in this imaginative and unsentimental chronicle of a bus traveling California’s back roads transporting the lost and the lonely the good and the greedy the stupid and the scheming the beautiful and the vicious away from their shattered dreams and possibly toward the promise of the future. Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath in 1940 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. A Book-of-the-Month Club selection and best seller on its appearance The Wayward Bus was the basis for the 1957 film starring Jayne Mansfield Joan Collins Dan Dailey and Rick Jason. The Viking Press hardcover