John Steinbeck allowing Steinbeck to spend a full day on the set of "The Grapes of Wrath" and the next day on the set of "Of Mice and Men." In the 1930s and 1940s, Ed Ricketts strongly influenced Steinbeck's writing. Steinbeck frequently took small trips with Ricketts along the California coast to give himself time off from his writing and to collect biological specimens, which Ricketts sold for a living. Their joint book about a collecting expedition to the Gulf of California in 1940, which was part travelogue and part natural history, published just as the U.S. entered World War II, never
Small Island (novel) Small Island (novel) Small Island is a 2004 prize-winning novel by British author Andrea Levy. It was adapted for television in two parts by the BBC in 2009, and is being adapted for the stage by Helen Edmundson. The novel is based on four main characters: Hortense, Queenie, Gilbert and Bernard and the story is told from each of their points of view. Its main plot is set in 1948 and focuses on the diaspora of Jamaican immigrants, who, escaping economic hardship on their own "small island," move to England, the Mother Country, for which the men have fought during