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The Wayward Bus : Steinbeck’s Misogynistic Manifesto?” in Rediscovering Steinbeck: Revisionist Views of His Art, Politics, and Intellect , ed. Cliff Lewis and Carroll Britch. Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen, 1989, 157-73.
    Lisca, Peter. “ The Wayward Bus : A Modern Pilgrimage,” in Steinbeck and His Critics , ed. E. W. Tedlock and C. V. Wicker. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1957, 281-90.
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    Morsberger, Robert E. “Steinbeck’s The Wayward Bus ,” in A Study Guide to Steinbeck, Part II , ed. Tetsumaro Hayashi. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1979, 210-31.
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    Owens, Louis D. “The Wayward Bus : A Triumph of Nature,” San Jose Studies 6 (February 1980), 45-53.
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    Railsback, Brian. “The Wayward Bus : Misogyny of Sexual Selection?” in After The Grapes of Wrath: Essays on John Steinbeck , ed. Donald V. Coers, Paul D. Ruffin, and Robert J. DeMott. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994, 125-35.
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    Seixas, Antonio. “John Steinbeck and the Non-Teleological Bus,” in Steinbeck and His Critics , ed. E. W. Tedlock and C. V. Wicker. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1957, 275-80.

FOR GWYN

I pray you all gyve audyence, And here this mater with reverence, By fygure a morall playe; The somonynge of Everyman called it is, That of our lyves and endynge shewes How transytory we be all daye.
    â€”EVERYMAN

CHAPTER 1
    Forty-two miles below San Ysidro, on a great north-south highway in California, there is a crossroad which for eighty-odd years has been called Rebel Corners. From here a country road goes at right angles toward the west until, after forty-nine miles, it connects with another north-south highway that leads from San Francisco to Los Angeles and, of course, Hollywood. 1 Anyone who wishes to go from the inland valley to the coast in this part of the state must take the road that begins at Rebel Corners and winds through hills and a little desert and through farmland and mountains until, at last, it comes to the coastal highway right in the middle of the town of San Juan de la Cruz.
    Rebel Corners got its name in 1862. It is said that a family named Blanken kept a smithy at the crossroads. The Blankens and their sons-in-law were poor, ignorant, proud, and violent Kentuckians. Having no furniture and no property, they brought what they had with them from the East—their prejudices and their politics. Having no slaves, they were ready, nevertheless, to sell their lives for the free principle of slavery. When the war began, the Blankens discussed traveling back across the measureless West to fight for the Confederacy. But it was a long way and they had crossed once, and it was too far. Thus it was that in a California which was preponderantly for the North, the Blankens seceded a hundred and sixty acres and a blacksmith shop from the Union and joined Blanken Corners to the Confederacy. It is also said that they dug trenches and cut rifle slits in the blacksmith shop to defend this rebellious island from the hated Yankees. And the Yankees, who were mostly Mexicans and Germans and Irish and Chinese, far from attacking the Blankens, were rather proud of them. The Blankens had never lived so well, for the enemy brought chickens and eggs and pork sausage in slaughter time, because everyone thought that, regardless of the cause, such courage should be recognized. Their place took the name of Rebel Corners and has kept it to this day.
    After the war the Blankens became lazy and quarrelsome and full of hatreds and complaints, as every defeated nation does, so that, pride in them having evaporated with the war, people stopped bringing their horses to be shoed and their plows for retipping. Finally, what the Union Armies could not do by force of arms the First National Bank of San Ysidro did by foreclosure.
    Now, after eighty-odd years, no one remembers much about the Blankens except that they were very proud and very unpleasant. In the following years the land