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The most distinct features in John Steinbeck's literature are the spirit of search for the real meaning of life and self-discovery in the midst of the endless change and the spirit of resistance against the injustice and contradictions in the human being and society. In Travels with Charley, Steinbeck tries to analyze his self, society and nation with the viewpoints of paradox and satire and the mixed feelings of hate and love, maintaining the attitude of a pilgrim to the hidden places of America, the monster of violence, restless longing for the further land, self-destruction, mysteries and dreams. The dualistic nature of the human being as the incarnation of evil and holiness is represented well in his masterpiece, East of Eden, which deals with the three generations of two families, especially the sins of the monster-like woman, Cathy, the enmity and rivalry between brothers, Adam and Charles in the second generation, Aron and Cal in the third generation. Steinbeck's deterministic naturalist view of life is compensated by his positive evaluation of forgiveness, compromise and accommodation of two well-rounded persons, Samuel Hamilton and Lee. Lee, the Chinese man who brought up Aron and Cal with faithful service, lets Adam say "Timshel" to Cal, a Hebrew word, meaning the possibilities of choice and freedom and opens the possible way to uniting Cal and Abra for another generation with his philosophy of proportion and rebirth. A Journal of a Novel is a kind of confession about his process of creating East of Eden, revealing his own conflicts about the good and bad sides of human existence, especially the nature of Cathy. Of Mice and Man is another novel about the wandering farmers like Grapes of Wrath, dealing with an innocent but immature man's killing of a sinful woman, while Grapes of Wrath portraits the protagonists' resistance against inhuman systems of capitalism and their awareness of the common people's solidarity, universal cosmopolitanism and social revolution. The Winter of our Discontent, a novel of existentialism, analyzes a middle aged man's psychological crises caused by economic and emotional difficulties, frustration, anger, illusion and discontent. Ethan Hawley, very intelligent and self-reflective, tries to commit a suicide, deluded by his own tricks to survive and disillusioned by the family problems but is saved miraculously at the last moment by the light of a yoni, his daughter's favorite talisman. We can see the author's sense of the mystery in human life. In America and Americans, Steinbeck attempts a self-criticism of the American way of life with the viewpoint of paradox and satire, searching for the integral identity of America in the tradition of the transcendental spirit of Thoreau and Emerson, the pragmatic spirit of Whitman and Melville's literary spirit of the human challenge to civilization.