The novelist who wrote The Grapes of Wrath and the director who produced Crisis and Lights Out in Europe combined their superb talents to tell the story of the coming of modern medicine to the natives of Mexico. There have been several notable examples of this pen-camera method of narration, but The Forgotten Village is unique among them in that Steinbeck wrote the text before a single picture was shot. The book and the movie from which The Forgotten Village was made have a continuity and a dramatic growth not to be found in typical documentary films of the time.From this wealth of pictures, 136 photographs were selected for their intrinsic beauty and for the graceful harmony with which they accompany Steinbeck’s text. This new script-photograph technique of narration conveys its ideas with unexcelled brilliance and immediacy. In the hands of such master storytellers as Steinbeck and Kline, it makes the reader catch his breath.

A Penguin ClassicWritten at a time of profound anxiety caused by the illness of his mother, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck draws on his memories of childhood in these stories about a boy who embodies both the rebellious spirit and the contradictory desire for acceptance of early adolescence. Unlike most coming-of-age stories, the cycle does not end with a hero “matured” by circumstances. As John Seelye writes in his introduction, reversing common interpretations, The Red Ponyis imbued with a sense of loss. Jody’s encounters with birth and death express a common theme in Steinbeck’s fiction: They are parts of the ongoing process of life, “resolving” nothing. The Red Pony was central not only to Steinbeck’s emergence as a major American novelist but to the shaping of a distinctly mid twentieth-century genre, opening up a new range of possibilities about the fictional presence of a child’s world. This edition contains an introduction by John Seelye.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.