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The Wayward Bus (Penguin Classics)
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Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Author: John Steinbeck
Publisher: Penguin Classics
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Our Price: $11.20
You Save: $ 2.80 ( 20% )
Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Author: John Steinbeck
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Average Customer Rating:
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The Wayward Bus (Penguin Classics) Description
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN: 9780142437872
ISBN: 0142437875
Label: Penguin Classics
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 288
Publication Date: 2006-03-28
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Studio: Penguin Classics
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN: 9780142437872
ISBN: 0142437875
Label: Penguin Classics
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 288
Publication Date: 2006-03-28
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Studio: Penguin Classics
Editorial Review of The Wayward Bus (Penguin Classics)
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 traveling 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.
Customer Reviews of The Wayward Bus (Penguin Classics)
Customer Rating: 
Review Summary: The Wayward Bus
Review: In a rundown bus on the back roads of California, a group of passengers bad their lives changed on the Wayward Bus named "Sweetheart". Authored by John Steinbeck, The Wayward Bus exhibits an understanding of the personal lives of these characters. While delving into lust and passion, these characters realized that they weren't simply on a bus ride, but that they were on a search for identity; this is what they all shared- an experience to help find themselves and to grow from.
As Juan Chicoy may have simply seemed like the normal bus driver, we saw that deeper problems brewed in the distance. Though not a religious man, The Virgin of Guadeloupe helped to provide him with guidance and in turn helped him make the decision to return back to the bus after having broken down.
The Pritchard Family provided the classic image of a wealthy family with discrepancies in happiness. As each member found their nature to be of some concern, these self-reflections provided the reader with understanding deeper than the material problems they displayed.
Though I am aware of the implications that each character plays on the story, Mr. Van Brunt's sickness at the end questioned me at first. I then came to realize that since he was depicted so harshly, he too needed a weakness (his secret strokes) to slow down in his search for identity.
I would most definitely recommend this book because more so in this sense, when the plot is more restricted, one dwells on the personas of the characters much more; this sets a better stage for reflection and philosophy to shine through without being engulfed by the plot.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Ride with Steinbeck
Review: In a style all his own John Steinbeck has written a classic story of the soul's search for meaning in The Wayward Bus. Following a group of travelers on their way through California, it details the lives of several characters and their hopes and dreams for what the future holds. As with any good character though, as he shows us rather well is that underneath all of their apparent differences, they are all human in their own flawed ways. One character that I remember really stood out was a night club dancer who gave off a very vivid picture in my mind of a very independent woman, who was also very sexy. A particular memory of her stripping and climbing into a giant martini glass was emblazoned on my mind, not only as being very erotic, (and tastefully done without being crude) but also was indicative of the kind of view of many people's taboos about sexuality during that time period. One thing that I thoroughly enjoyed in this book was the author's use of descriptions of the scenes passing by as the bus ride went along, and his transitions between character's thoughts flowed very nicely into one another. I'll have to read this one again!
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Steinbeck's Style Is Effective
Review: Coming into this novel, readers, as people, have always known different ways to take the behavior of strangers. We might meet strangers in a coffee shop, in the lobby of some building, or through the services strangers provide in businesses of less familiarity--more distant restaurants or stores, or through transportation services--or even at our own work. Unusual behavior by a stranger is not going to win the traditional observation, "Hey, that's unusual for you. Could you explain yourself?" We don't know them, don't know whether it is unusual for them, per se, and don't necessarily have any right to an explanation. What makes it unusual is that it is unusual in our own experience, less common, even outstanding, compared to what we've been through and done.
One way to take unusual behavior by a stranger is soliptically, through solipsism. Solipsism, officially, is a philosophy, an epistemological theory. It asserts that "I" am the only known conscious person, since mine is the only consciousness of which I am conscious. It's common to take things this way--even if rarely spelled out, although it is spelled out here. Behavior is taken symbolically, for what it means to me. A stranger in a coffee shop spills her coffee just a minute after I've ordered a coffee, only half a day after I've sworn I'd cut down on coffee. Now, such an event can be taken as symbolic only. I don't know whether that customer is usually clumsy. I do not regard that customer's life, and consciousness, at all. Her spillage just carries a message for me in my continuous consciousness. . . . After a little while, I remember. I remember having foresworn excess coffee. This connection gives this event an interpretation, and a certainty. I avoid the coffee that I ordered. I get out of it. This is certain. I reorder my beverage, or I leave before the coffee reaches my table, but I get out of it.
But, in considering ways to take the behavior of strangers, suppose we have joined up with the conventions of some social organization. Suppose that "I" am convinced that this "I" has a duty to enforce the rules of a profession or of a religion, a school, a hospital, or some other institution. There is no going back to the life of the individual. Now, as one of us, I am on a mission: to make things right. I have the stuffiness of the librarian who reacts with righteous indignation to the behavior of patrons, a symbol of high social propriety if ever there was one. Elementary schoolteachers, assistant parishioners, crossing guards, interior decorators, flower gardeners, and editorial assistants all fit this bill very well. The behavior of strangers is taken as something that is either right and conforming, or wrong and requiring immediate correction before it gets out of hand. There is a rear bumper missing on a car. The transaxle and wheel axle are in plain sight. The crossing guard on her lunch break notices, puts her cup down on the road barrier, and calls out to the person getting out of the car, with a rebuke. She asks him whether he plans to drive around here like that, as she watches his face for emotional reaction. The cops could ticket him, she says, hoping to provoke him. A few days earlier, she was reading The Wayward Bus, the part that describes a long-distance coach bus getting stuck in mud. Its transaxle and rear axle, when they got planted, definitely stopped the bus for a long, long episode. She forgets about that. This is an error, which presents an opportunity for her to correct now. She has promoted the motor vehicle bureau in her town, and she holds her head high after that.
And this brings us to the deep way to take the behavior of strangers, when that behavior is unusual. Intelligently one endeavors to see into the stranger's life and character. What is that person's incentive? There are circumstances in which the person lives, loves, pursues ambitions, finds entertainment--circumstances to which the stranger here gives clues. Then there are the things that appear to have happened to them recently or that have happened in the stranger's neighborhood, community, county, nation, or planet. The stranger who sits all alone and very still in a huge waiting room for many, many minutes on end--she gives clues. It's in her hair, her facial cosmetics, the proportions of her body. It's in her choice of baggage. It's in the way she stiffly moves when there's a noise. Yes, I may have been sitting very still myself--but that is not of interest. So? "I" have known me for a long time, and would rather not think about me at this time. What I have here is a curiosity piece. Yes, sitting still suggests inappropriate apprehensions, out of place here, but I don't feel any moral authority over anyone. I take things deeply. I am a regular John Steinbeck, and I seek to rebuild the overall circumstances and recent events and immediate feelings of the strangers who, with their unusual behaviors, come into my life.
For most of The Wayward Bus, Steinbeck takes the unusual behavior of strangers in this way.
He makes plain this woman's beauty. He looks upon her skin and then peers under it. The product of this naturalist explanation approach is understanding. Now, too, we have ideas when we see similar behavior, we, too, have guesses awaiting confirmation. We have general principles with which to work. When the behavior could have disturbed us before reading this novel, it now sparks our imagination, and it starts up the engines of our understanding. After thinking, it turns out that the stranger is a woman of such beauty that she attracts attention from men in every direction, and sitting still is the best method at her disposal for attracting fewer. When she stirs about, parts of her body shimmer, and men notice. If she does anything of interest to her--puts on cosmetics, speaks on a telephone, anything--men will watch her tilt her head, will observe the expression on her face, listen for the lilt in her voice, trying to record the emotions she expresses. Much of the novel, in fact, is devoted to getting better understanding of a woman whose beauty is fabled.
Steinbeck describes less perfect people. Why would a business executive offer at first sight a job to a woman, with his wife sitting a few rows back in the bus? The man has convinced himself that he really sees her as an efficient secretary and has forgotten his own, current secretary, and can manipulate people on this bus trip. His past clues us in to his confidence that neither his wife nor this prospective employee, neither one will get too much information about the other. His cordial relations with his wife are part of this disposition. These relations are studied through the couple's behavior in the station coffee shop and here on the bus. The manager at that shop was also a stranger. She especially loathed house flies. She was chasing a housefly. Even the very disposition toward strangers that is opposed to Steinbeck's in the novel is studied. The coffee shop manager has no time to endeavor to "understand" house flies. To dramatize this error, the narrator switches his viewpoint to the fly's. He describes its motives, how it cleans itself, and times its self-cleaning with its sleep, and times its sleep with its pursuit of sustenance. This deep approach to the behaviors of strangers ennobles the quotidian by recognizing meanings in humdrum, everyday chores.
All behavior and dialogue is determined, and the literary style is naturalism. Patient curiosity reveals the causal chains, and liberates, giving us a viewpoint of calm observation that transcends the maelstrom of events. Liberty is the freedom of wisdom, and Steinbeck's book "The Wayward Bus" is a wise book--until Steinbeck himself has to acknowledge one more, one less fortunate, way to take the behavior of strangers.
It is the way of the populist, the salesman. Once the bus really gets going on its trip to San Juan de la Cruz, Steinbeck understands himself as on the way to Hollywood. If this book's message is really going to reach the masses of humanity, it needs to be rendered an event on the silver screen. That requires plot, events moving too quickly to allow understanding to interfere. Many more tens of thousands of people will read a novel if they have seen it in the movies or heard of the movie. Steinbeck takes the behavior of strangers as a mass "they". They have their own interests already. He knows these interests, he's studied them. What they lack is the effort to understand other human beings. They don't treat others as equals. Men treat women with indifference. Wives expect too much of husbands. Workers fete themselves with idealistic visions of celebrities. Beauties sell themselves for a buck. And none of them are predisposed to read understanding novels. Steinbeck understands this, so he sells off the last quarter of his novel as an advertisement. It's full of sizzling sexual scenes, controversies, violations, charges and counter-charges, innuendo, duplicity, and guile. It's a vehicle for carrying the messages of the novel, and it works.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Four and twenty passengers stuck on a bus
Review: Juan Chicoy was the driver of the bus and his mission was to get his passengers safely to their destination. He was driving down the California coast towards Mexico where Juan encounters a terrible rainstorm along the way. The bus becomes stuck in a ditch and they are seemingly stranded. Some of Juan's passengers are employees of Alice, Juan's alcoholic wife who manages a lunchroom. These include Norma, a waitress, and Kit "Pimples" Carson, nicknamed for his acne scarred face. The other passengers are Mildred and her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Pritchard, a voluptuous blond, a salesman, and cranky old Mr. Van Brunt. Many of the passengers are escaping from their dull lives and others have ambitions they desire to bring to fruition.
It took me quite a while to get into the book's story, of which there is little. The plot is instead character driven. We learn that the Pritchard's marriage is not as ideal as it seemed at first, and that Mrs. Pritchard is neurotic and suffers from headaches which she often blames on her kindly, but hapless husband. Norma has Hollywood and Clark Gable on her mind, and has some misplaced admiration for Camille. Pimples hopes to study about radar, is extremely lonely, has an inferiority complex, and has a crush on the virginal Norma.
By the trip's end, people whom I originally thought dull and mundane, become good and worthy individuals whom I learn to care about. Such is the genius of John Steinbeck, who again shows great competence in transforming his characters.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Our Wayward SUVs?
Review: With its gritty realism "The Wayward Bus" unravels much of the post WWII American utopia, the last glitters of which we see today. The story centers on an odd cast of characters traveling in a rickety old bus along a remote stretch of the California desert. The bus and its occupants provide a microcosm of a society adrift. It serves as a stark contrast to Norman Rockwell's noble mid-twentieth century caricature of America, exemplified in his romantic renderings of the coherent small town Americana with its close knit familial values. The novel starkly exposes America as a nation of gypsies, who seeking wealth or adventure, look to their meanderings as a means to fufill their superficial yearnings. It is only with the break down of the bus that each individual is forced to come to grips with the decisions they must make to provide greater purpose in their lives.
Curiously enough, for some of us today society seems analogous to a broken down bus. I wonder if we can take heart from Steinbeck's message and realize that some of our answers rest in confronting more forthrightly our current problems as we awake from our wayward SUVs.
Review Summary: The Wayward Bus
Review: In a rundown bus on the back roads of California, a group of passengers bad their lives changed on the Wayward Bus named "Sweetheart". Authored by John Steinbeck, The Wayward Bus exhibits an understanding of the personal lives of these characters. While delving into lust and passion, these characters realized that they weren't simply on a bus ride, but that they were on a search for identity; this is what they all shared- an experience to help find themselves and to grow from.
As Juan Chicoy may have simply seemed like the normal bus driver, we saw that deeper problems brewed in the distance. Though not a religious man, The Virgin of Guadeloupe helped to provide him with guidance and in turn helped him make the decision to return back to the bus after having broken down.
The Pritchard Family provided the classic image of a wealthy family with discrepancies in happiness. As each member found their nature to be of some concern, these self-reflections provided the reader with understanding deeper than the material problems they displayed.
Though I am aware of the implications that each character plays on the story, Mr. Van Brunt's sickness at the end questioned me at first. I then came to realize that since he was depicted so harshly, he too needed a weakness (his secret strokes) to slow down in his search for identity.
I would most definitely recommend this book because more so in this sense, when the plot is more restricted, one dwells on the personas of the characters much more; this sets a better stage for reflection and philosophy to shine through without being engulfed by the plot.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Ride with Steinbeck
Review: In a style all his own John Steinbeck has written a classic story of the soul's search for meaning in The Wayward Bus. Following a group of travelers on their way through California, it details the lives of several characters and their hopes and dreams for what the future holds. As with any good character though, as he shows us rather well is that underneath all of their apparent differences, they are all human in their own flawed ways. One character that I remember really stood out was a night club dancer who gave off a very vivid picture in my mind of a very independent woman, who was also very sexy. A particular memory of her stripping and climbing into a giant martini glass was emblazoned on my mind, not only as being very erotic, (and tastefully done without being crude) but also was indicative of the kind of view of many people's taboos about sexuality during that time period. One thing that I thoroughly enjoyed in this book was the author's use of descriptions of the scenes passing by as the bus ride went along, and his transitions between character's thoughts flowed very nicely into one another. I'll have to read this one again!
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Steinbeck's Style Is Effective
Review: Coming into this novel, readers, as people, have always known different ways to take the behavior of strangers. We might meet strangers in a coffee shop, in the lobby of some building, or through the services strangers provide in businesses of less familiarity--more distant restaurants or stores, or through transportation services--or even at our own work. Unusual behavior by a stranger is not going to win the traditional observation, "Hey, that's unusual for you. Could you explain yourself?" We don't know them, don't know whether it is unusual for them, per se, and don't necessarily have any right to an explanation. What makes it unusual is that it is unusual in our own experience, less common, even outstanding, compared to what we've been through and done.
One way to take unusual behavior by a stranger is soliptically, through solipsism. Solipsism, officially, is a philosophy, an epistemological theory. It asserts that "I" am the only known conscious person, since mine is the only consciousness of which I am conscious. It's common to take things this way--even if rarely spelled out, although it is spelled out here. Behavior is taken symbolically, for what it means to me. A stranger in a coffee shop spills her coffee just a minute after I've ordered a coffee, only half a day after I've sworn I'd cut down on coffee. Now, such an event can be taken as symbolic only. I don't know whether that customer is usually clumsy. I do not regard that customer's life, and consciousness, at all. Her spillage just carries a message for me in my continuous consciousness. . . . After a little while, I remember. I remember having foresworn excess coffee. This connection gives this event an interpretation, and a certainty. I avoid the coffee that I ordered. I get out of it. This is certain. I reorder my beverage, or I leave before the coffee reaches my table, but I get out of it.
But, in considering ways to take the behavior of strangers, suppose we have joined up with the conventions of some social organization. Suppose that "I" am convinced that this "I" has a duty to enforce the rules of a profession or of a religion, a school, a hospital, or some other institution. There is no going back to the life of the individual. Now, as one of us, I am on a mission: to make things right. I have the stuffiness of the librarian who reacts with righteous indignation to the behavior of patrons, a symbol of high social propriety if ever there was one. Elementary schoolteachers, assistant parishioners, crossing guards, interior decorators, flower gardeners, and editorial assistants all fit this bill very well. The behavior of strangers is taken as something that is either right and conforming, or wrong and requiring immediate correction before it gets out of hand. There is a rear bumper missing on a car. The transaxle and wheel axle are in plain sight. The crossing guard on her lunch break notices, puts her cup down on the road barrier, and calls out to the person getting out of the car, with a rebuke. She asks him whether he plans to drive around here like that, as she watches his face for emotional reaction. The cops could ticket him, she says, hoping to provoke him. A few days earlier, she was reading The Wayward Bus, the part that describes a long-distance coach bus getting stuck in mud. Its transaxle and rear axle, when they got planted, definitely stopped the bus for a long, long episode. She forgets about that. This is an error, which presents an opportunity for her to correct now. She has promoted the motor vehicle bureau in her town, and she holds her head high after that.
And this brings us to the deep way to take the behavior of strangers, when that behavior is unusual. Intelligently one endeavors to see into the stranger's life and character. What is that person's incentive? There are circumstances in which the person lives, loves, pursues ambitions, finds entertainment--circumstances to which the stranger here gives clues. Then there are the things that appear to have happened to them recently or that have happened in the stranger's neighborhood, community, county, nation, or planet. The stranger who sits all alone and very still in a huge waiting room for many, many minutes on end--she gives clues. It's in her hair, her facial cosmetics, the proportions of her body. It's in her choice of baggage. It's in the way she stiffly moves when there's a noise. Yes, I may have been sitting very still myself--but that is not of interest. So? "I" have known me for a long time, and would rather not think about me at this time. What I have here is a curiosity piece. Yes, sitting still suggests inappropriate apprehensions, out of place here, but I don't feel any moral authority over anyone. I take things deeply. I am a regular John Steinbeck, and I seek to rebuild the overall circumstances and recent events and immediate feelings of the strangers who, with their unusual behaviors, come into my life.
For most of The Wayward Bus, Steinbeck takes the unusual behavior of strangers in this way.
He makes plain this woman's beauty. He looks upon her skin and then peers under it. The product of this naturalist explanation approach is understanding. Now, too, we have ideas when we see similar behavior, we, too, have guesses awaiting confirmation. We have general principles with which to work. When the behavior could have disturbed us before reading this novel, it now sparks our imagination, and it starts up the engines of our understanding. After thinking, it turns out that the stranger is a woman of such beauty that she attracts attention from men in every direction, and sitting still is the best method at her disposal for attracting fewer. When she stirs about, parts of her body shimmer, and men notice. If she does anything of interest to her--puts on cosmetics, speaks on a telephone, anything--men will watch her tilt her head, will observe the expression on her face, listen for the lilt in her voice, trying to record the emotions she expresses. Much of the novel, in fact, is devoted to getting better understanding of a woman whose beauty is fabled.
Steinbeck describes less perfect people. Why would a business executive offer at first sight a job to a woman, with his wife sitting a few rows back in the bus? The man has convinced himself that he really sees her as an efficient secretary and has forgotten his own, current secretary, and can manipulate people on this bus trip. His past clues us in to his confidence that neither his wife nor this prospective employee, neither one will get too much information about the other. His cordial relations with his wife are part of this disposition. These relations are studied through the couple's behavior in the station coffee shop and here on the bus. The manager at that shop was also a stranger. She especially loathed house flies. She was chasing a housefly. Even the very disposition toward strangers that is opposed to Steinbeck's in the novel is studied. The coffee shop manager has no time to endeavor to "understand" house flies. To dramatize this error, the narrator switches his viewpoint to the fly's. He describes its motives, how it cleans itself, and times its self-cleaning with its sleep, and times its sleep with its pursuit of sustenance. This deep approach to the behaviors of strangers ennobles the quotidian by recognizing meanings in humdrum, everyday chores.
All behavior and dialogue is determined, and the literary style is naturalism. Patient curiosity reveals the causal chains, and liberates, giving us a viewpoint of calm observation that transcends the maelstrom of events. Liberty is the freedom of wisdom, and Steinbeck's book "The Wayward Bus" is a wise book--until Steinbeck himself has to acknowledge one more, one less fortunate, way to take the behavior of strangers.
It is the way of the populist, the salesman. Once the bus really gets going on its trip to San Juan de la Cruz, Steinbeck understands himself as on the way to Hollywood. If this book's message is really going to reach the masses of humanity, it needs to be rendered an event on the silver screen. That requires plot, events moving too quickly to allow understanding to interfere. Many more tens of thousands of people will read a novel if they have seen it in the movies or heard of the movie. Steinbeck takes the behavior of strangers as a mass "they". They have their own interests already. He knows these interests, he's studied them. What they lack is the effort to understand other human beings. They don't treat others as equals. Men treat women with indifference. Wives expect too much of husbands. Workers fete themselves with idealistic visions of celebrities. Beauties sell themselves for a buck. And none of them are predisposed to read understanding novels. Steinbeck understands this, so he sells off the last quarter of his novel as an advertisement. It's full of sizzling sexual scenes, controversies, violations, charges and counter-charges, innuendo, duplicity, and guile. It's a vehicle for carrying the messages of the novel, and it works.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Four and twenty passengers stuck on a bus
Review: Juan Chicoy was the driver of the bus and his mission was to get his passengers safely to their destination. He was driving down the California coast towards Mexico where Juan encounters a terrible rainstorm along the way. The bus becomes stuck in a ditch and they are seemingly stranded. Some of Juan's passengers are employees of Alice, Juan's alcoholic wife who manages a lunchroom. These include Norma, a waitress, and Kit "Pimples" Carson, nicknamed for his acne scarred face. The other passengers are Mildred and her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Pritchard, a voluptuous blond, a salesman, and cranky old Mr. Van Brunt. Many of the passengers are escaping from their dull lives and others have ambitions they desire to bring to fruition.
It took me quite a while to get into the book's story, of which there is little. The plot is instead character driven. We learn that the Pritchard's marriage is not as ideal as it seemed at first, and that Mrs. Pritchard is neurotic and suffers from headaches which she often blames on her kindly, but hapless husband. Norma has Hollywood and Clark Gable on her mind, and has some misplaced admiration for Camille. Pimples hopes to study about radar, is extremely lonely, has an inferiority complex, and has a crush on the virginal Norma.
By the trip's end, people whom I originally thought dull and mundane, become good and worthy individuals whom I learn to care about. Such is the genius of John Steinbeck, who again shows great competence in transforming his characters.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Our Wayward SUVs?
Review: With its gritty realism "The Wayward Bus" unravels much of the post WWII American utopia, the last glitters of which we see today. The story centers on an odd cast of characters traveling in a rickety old bus along a remote stretch of the California desert. The bus and its occupants provide a microcosm of a society adrift. It serves as a stark contrast to Norman Rockwell's noble mid-twentieth century caricature of America, exemplified in his romantic renderings of the coherent small town Americana with its close knit familial values. The novel starkly exposes America as a nation of gypsies, who seeking wealth or adventure, look to their meanderings as a means to fufill their superficial yearnings. It is only with the break down of the bus that each individual is forced to come to grips with the decisions they must make to provide greater purpose in their lives.
Curiously enough, for some of us today society seems analogous to a broken down bus. I wonder if we can take heart from Steinbeck's message and realize that some of our answers rest in confronting more forthrightly our current problems as we awake from our wayward SUVs.