The Winter of Our Discontent

The Winter of Our Discontent is the last novel by the American writer and 1962 Nobel laureate John Steinbeck. The English original was published in 1961, and it is his only novel set in New England, in the eastern United States. The protagonist, Ethan Allen Hawley, comes from a locally once-prominent family that has since declined. He works as a clerk in a grocery store owned by Marullo, an Italian immigrant, on a meager income; his wife Mary manages the household thriftily, their two children are growing up, and the gaze of neighbors and acquaintances weighs heavily on him. He habitually masks his inner bitterness and resentment with banter, self-mockery, and a stream of literary allusions. Under the material temptations of postwar America's "affluent society," his family's expectations, and the encouragement—deliberate or not—of those around him, Ethan one by one betrays the "goodness" he once held to: he informs on the employer who treated him like family and takes the store for himself; he schemes to obtain the ancestral property of his childhood friend Danny Taylor, now down-and-out and drinking; and he maneuvers with the cunning banker Baker to gain the upper hand in a land-development deal. Just as he seems to have gained everything he once wanted, scandal breaks over his son's cheating in a national essay contest, and a woman who once urged him toward self-interest comes to blackmail him; torn between greed and conscience, Ethan moves toward awakening and self-judgment. Through meticulous psychological portraiture and biting social observation, the novel dissects the erosion of materialism on human nature and communal ethics. It is regarded as an important achievement of Steinbeck's later career and as one of the works that helped earn him the Nobel Prize in Literature.