![]() ![]() He has the opportunity to invest his wife’s inheritance but struggles with the possibility of losing it. Their perception of him as capable of acquiring wealth and influence makes Ethan question his own life choices. Ethan has accepted his lower socioeconomic status and working life, but his family and friends urge him to reclaim his family’s previously illustrious status. Ethan’s late father lost the family fortune through poor investments and an economic depression. ![]() Ethan Hawley is a married man with two children who works at a grocery store his family once owned. The novel is set in New Baytown, New York, in 1961. ![]() Content warnings include death by by suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, racial slurs, and anti-immigrant bias. This guide uses the 2008 Penguin Classic edition of the text. Like Steinbeck’s other novels, The Winter of Our Discontent centers on the fate of the everyman in an unjust world. He won a Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck is one of the most important American writers of the 20th century. Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature for the novel in 1962. Others believed the novel signaled the weakening of Steinbeck’s literary talent and found the protagonist, Ethan Hawley, unbelievable for his wild swings between criminality and moral piety. ![]() Prominent critics, such as Edward Weeks of the Atlantic Monthly and Saul Bellow, hailed it as an instant classic and insightful commentary on America’s preoccupation with greed and wealth at the expense of morality. The critical reception of The Winter of Our Discontent varied. ![]()
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