The Wayward Bus (1947) - John Steinbeck

Written by John Steinbeck
Read by Richard Poe
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Length: 9 hrs and 13 mins
Release date: 07-14-15
Publisher: Penguin Audio

Steinbeck’s vision comes wonderfully to life in this imaginative and unsentimental chronicle of a bus traveling California’s back roads, transporting the lost and the lonely, the good and the greedy, the stupid and the scheming, the beautiful and the vicious away from their shattered dreams and, possibly, toward the promise of the future. Juan Chicoy is at the wheel, a man of the land, hot-blooded and uninhibited.

It isn’t the trip that is the focus; it is the people themselves, their individual lives and characters. There are nine protagonists of whom none dominates the narrative. The viewpoint shifts between them all and changes from external dialogue to internal monologue as the reader experiences each individual’s thoughts. This is the novel’s core as it establishes and delineates each character. The obscure bus stop and the bus trip are just a back drop and setting to the people. Not a lot actually happens in the novel, as it is characterizations that it’s heart and how each is so different from the other, which mirrors real life.

It is a short novel that takes place over the space of one day.

This novel was filmed in 1957