Really excellent. The Red Pony is just so sad. The stories are very dark, and the places are so well described, you can practically smell them.

Having read every last book of Steinbeck's ouvre, I turned to The Long Valley recently when driving through central California. It was the first time in almost 30 years I had cracked the book open.

Reading it now, one finds so many early versions of later stories Steinbeck would write: "Flight" foreshadows the tragic chase found in The Pearl; "The Harness" looks to the superior short story collection, The Pastures of Heaven; the bizarre, sensual tale, "The Snake," features Ed Ricketts, central character of the fictional Cannery Row and non-fictional The Log from the Sea of Cortez; "The Raid" would come back even more vividly in the books, In Dubious Battle and--in Root's words to his attackers--The Grapes of Wrath. Throughout the book, I realized that I was reading drafts and sketches that were fully realized in later, longer works.

My favorite story in the collection is "Johnny Bear," a fascinating take-down of a prominent family in a village called Loma. The "Bear" of the title is a mentally handicapped man with a gift for mimickry. Johnny Bear foreshadows Lenny in Of Mice and Men as well as Tularecito, a character in The Pastures of Heaven. The way Steinbeck frames the story--told from the POV of a foreman on a dredging unit trying to drain a nearby swamp--and his use of imagery really kept my attention. The ending was quite a surprise, too.

This isn't Steinbeck's best work, but it is a very good one. For Steinbeck fans, I would recommend it, but I would reserve judgment on the author himself until after people have read the better-developed novels I mentioned above.

Consistently good stories about bad men and strange women. Great collection!

La grande vallata è una raccolta di 12 racconti in cui il punto di collegamento e continuità è costituito dall’ambientazione, la California Central Valley, la stessa verso cui sono diretti i migranti in Furore.

Steinbeck ci descrive una terra fortemente antropizzata, nel profondo dell’America, in cui un mondo di emarginati è alla ricerca di un futuro, non necessariamente migliore.

Sono racconti ruvidi in cui la solitudine è uno dei temi principali, oltre alla quotidiana sopravvivenza.
Alcuni racconti forse mancano di definizione, mentre altri sembrano la genesi di probabili futuri romanzi.
È certo che in tutti appare evidente la sensibilità dell’autore verso un mondo violentato e privato, raccontato con una scrittura magistrale e la peculiare delicatezza dello sguardo.
E anche qui Steinbeck da il suo meglio nei finali.

Collection of short stories from early in his career. Nothing particularly stands out.

A baker's dozen of masterful stories with nary a dud amongst them.

What struck me about this collection of short stories was how real they all felt, and how much the characters felt relatable and just tangible. Like these people actually lived, something accentuated by the first-person POV in some stories. Of course, this being Steinbeck, the writing is beautiful; whether he's describing a landscape or an action, he makes these stories flow like mountain water. And while some of the actual stories aren't that interesting (chiefly, The Raid), the highlights are classics, with themes and symbolism that are the stuff of high school English classes. In fact, almost every story here was enjoyable in its own unique way, and there are a few I will remember for a long time. The best moment of the novel, to me, was near the end of The Red Pony:

Spoiler

the young boy Jody's grandfather has just heard his son-in-law complaining about the stories of Indians he tells so often. The grandfather goes outside, and when Jody tries to comfort him, he says this:

"I tell those stories, but they're not what I want to tell. I only know how I want people to feel when I tell them.

It wasn't Indians that were important, nor adventures, nor even getting out here. It was a whole bunch of people made into one big crawling beast. And I was the head. It was westering and westering. Every man wanted something for himself, but the big beast that was all of them wanted only westering. I was the leader, but if I hadn't been there, someone else would have been the head. The thing had to have a head. Under the little bushes the shadows were black at white noonday. When we saw the mountains at last, we cried – all of us. But it wasn't getting here that mattered, it was movement and westering. We carried life out here and set it down the way those ants carry eggs. And I was the leader. The westering was as big as God, and the slow steps that made the movement piled up and piled up until the continent was crossed.

Then we came down to the sea, and it was done." He stopped and wiped his eyes until the rims were red. "That's what I should be telling instead of stories."

It's hard to describe what I felt when I read that passage, but it seems to put the rest of the book into context: a long journey west, where it isn't the destination but the journey that matters. And I'd have to agree with that.

Favorite story: The Red Pony