The Winter of Our Discontent Summary: Steinbeck's Last Novel Explained
What the book is about
The Winter of Our Discontent was John Steinbeck's last novel, published in 1961. It follows Ethan Allen Hawley, a grocery store clerk in the fictional town of New Baytown, New York. Ethan's family once belonged to Long Island's aristocratic class. His late father lost the family fortune, and Ethan now works behind the counter of a shop his family used to own. The job pays. It does not impress anyone.
That is the pressure the whole book runs on. Ethan's wife Mary and their children resent their ordinary position. They do not share his attachment to honesty and integrity, and they do not see much reward in it. Around him, the town's businessmen and politicians run their own quiet arrangements. Ethan holds the line for a while. Then he starts to work out what it would take to stop holding it.
Steinbeck took the title from the opening lines of Shakespeare's Richard III: "Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York." The pun on sun and son sits under the whole novel, because Ethan's own son becomes part of the moral reckoning. It is also the only Steinbeck work set entirely on the East Coast of the United States, drawing mainly on Sag Harbor, New York.
The main characters
Ethan Allen Hawley is the centre of everything. He is clever, self-aware and talkative in his own head, which makes his decline harder to watch, because he narrates each step and keeps telling himself he is still the same man. He fought in the war and killed enemy soldiers there, and he uses that memory to argue with himself about what counts as a crime.
Mary Hawley, his wife, wants more than the life they have. Their children feel the same. Alfio Marullo is the Italian American owner of the store where Ethan works, a man who believes Ethan is fundamentally honest. Margie, an acquaintance, pushes Ethan towards accepting bribes. The bank manager, whose ancestors Ethan blames for the family's ruin, urges him to be more ruthless. Joey, a bank teller and friend, cheerfully explains how a person might rob a bank and get away with it. Danny Taylor is the town drunk and Ethan's childhood friend, and he owns a piece of land that matters a great deal to other people.
What makes the cast effective is that nobody forces Ethan into anything. Every one of them simply offers advice, opportunity or permission. He takes it.
The themes
The central question is whether integrity is a character trait or a habit that can be put down. Ethan does not have a crisis and flip. He drifts, reasons, rehearses. He discovers Marullo may be an illegal immigrant and makes an anonymous tip to the immigration authorities. He plans a bank robbery in detail. He gives money to Danny Taylor knowing what Danny will do with it. At each point he keeps up a running commentary telling himself he is not really that kind of man.
Money and class sit underneath it. Ethan's fall from the aristocratic class is old family history, but the humiliation is current and daily. The novel is sharp about how a whole community can agree that success excuses method, and how fast a decent man learns the vocabulary of that agreement.
Family is the third strand. Ethan tells himself he is doing it for Mary and the children. Then his son wins honourable mention in a nationwide essay contest by plagiarising classic American authors and orators. Confronted, the boy denies feeling guilty at all and insists everyone cheats and lies. Ethan is looking at his own reasoning, repeated back to him by a teenager who has not even bothered to dress it up.
How it ends
Stop here if you do not want the ending.
Marullo, taken into custody after Ethan's tip, transfers ownership of the store to Ethan, because he believes Ethan is honest and deserving. Danny Taylor dies and leaves the important piece of land to Mary in his will. Ethan is now positioned to control the covert dealings of the town's businessmen and politicians. The bank robbery never happens, stopped only by external circumstances rather than conscience.
After the guilt of Marullo's deportation, the death of Danny and his son's flat refusal to feel shame, Ethan resolves to kill himself. His daughter senses what he intends and slips a family talisman into his pocket during a long embrace. Ethan sequesters himself in an alcove as the tide comes in and reaches into his pocket for razorblades. He finds the talisman instead. The book ends with him struggling to get out so he can return it to his daughter.
Why it still matters
It is a novel about a good man talking himself into bad things, written in the voice of the man doing the talking. That is a hard trick, and it keeps the book from being a sermon. Readers who want Steinbeck's social conscience without the dust and the migrant roads will find it here, moved east and shrunk down to one household and one till.
It also works as a book about what parents pass on without meaning to. Ethan's son is the answer to every excuse Ethan has made. For anyone interested in how ordinary corruption actually happens, one small concession at a time, this is the Steinbeck to read.
