Brown Bag Book Club to Meet February 15   Clifton Forge, VA (Feb. 5, 2018) - The Clifton Forge Public Library’s Brown Bag Book Club will meet on Thursday, February 15.    The group will discuss “The Winter of Our Discontent.” John Steinbeck’s final novel, a tale of degeneration, corruption, and spiritual crisis, was published in 1961. Ethan Allen Hawley, the protagonist, is a clerk in the grocery store that his family once owned. No longer a member of Long Island’s aristocratic class, Ethan’s wife “is restless, and his teenage children are hungry for the tantalizing material comforts he cannot provide.” One day, in a moment of moral crisis, “Ethan decides to take a holiday from his own scrupulous standards.  Set in Steinbeck’s contemporary 1960 America, the novel explores the tenuous line between private and public honesty, and today ranks alongside his most acclaimed works of penetrating insight into the American condition.” In his review for the “Atlantic Monthly,” Edward Weeks hailed the book as “a Steinbeck classic,” stating: “His dialogue is full of life, the entrapment of Ethan is ingenious, and the morality in this novel marks Mr. Steinbeck's return to the mood and the concern with which he wrote ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’" Saul Bellow also lauded the book, saying: "John Steinbeck returns to the high standards of ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ and to the social themes that made his early work so impressive, and so powerful." In awarding John Steinbeck the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel committee stated that with “The Winter of Our Discontent,” he had “resumed his position as an independent expounder of the truth, with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American.”  The group meets from 11:30 a.m. to 12:45 p.m., in the Library’s Michael Armstrong Community Room. New members are always welcome.  Participants are encouraged to bring a friend and to bring a lunch. Dessert will be provided.  For more information, contact Helene Baker at 860-558-2170, or email her at ibusybee22@gmail.com.   The library is located at 535 Church Street.  For information on any library programs, call the Clifton Forge Public Library at 863-2519.

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