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
George Mills (novel) George Mills (novel) George Mills is a 1982 novel by American author Stanley Elkin, published by E. P. Dutton. The novel, set in five parts, tells the family history of succeeding generations of characters named George Mills. The story covers more than 1,000 years from the First Crusade in Europe to the Ottoman Empire to present-day America. Elkin won the 1982 National Book Critics Circle Award in the fiction category for the novel. Elkin mentioned "George Mills" as one of his favorite novels. The novel is considered Elkin's "longest and most complexly organized work". The first George Mills sets out