THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT

by John Steinbeck · 1961

John Steinbeck’s final novel, *The Winter of Our Discontent*, follows Ethan Allen Hawley, a once‑proud scion of a New England merchant family now reduced to clerking in a modest grocery store. As the 1960s American Dream slips further from his grasp, Ethan’s restless wife and material‑hungry teenage children amplify his sense of loss. When a sudden moral crisis forces him to abandon his long‑held scruples, Ethan confronts the thin line between private integrity and public ambition. Steinbeck probes the corrosive lure of success, the legacy of a fallen aristocracy, and the quiet desperation that can drive ordinary people to extraordinary compromise. The novel offers a penetrating, timeless portrait of a nation wrestling with its own values.