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Hwang, Cheebok. “John Steinbeck’s The Pastures of Heaven: The Traditional American Vision of Success.” Studies in English Language & Literature. 42.3 (2016): 187-206. This study aims to analyze John Steinbeck's earliest published work, The Pastures of Heaven, which is a collection of stories about the inhabitants of a fertile valley in California. This novel consists of short stories that describe particular times and places within the valley. Everyone in the valley including the main character, the Bert Munroes is trying to seek the quest for his own happiness. In fact, the world Steinbeck describes in each of these stories is fraught with barriers that are erected largely by misguided human perceptions. Thus, in this study as Steinbeck’s non-teleological philosophy accords with several other Eastern cosmological precepts as well, I analyzed each character from Eastern philosophical and religious traditions including Hinduism and Buddhism related to Steinbeck's non-teleological philosophy. I thus applied Eastern ideas such as maya, lila, karma, and moksha in the procedure of the quest of happiness which characters seek. In a wide range of views, analyzing this work through the views for Eastern traditions elucidates much insufficiency of the American vision. Therefore, I think what Steinbeck intends in this work is to bring the spiritual imagination of the American mind to the crisis of America to face its inevitable destiny. (Jeonju University)