"The Winter of Our Discontent" is a novel written by John Steinbeck, published in 1961, and set a year earlier. Like most (but not all), of Steinbeck's work, it is a socially realistic novel dealing with contemporary issues.
Ethan Allen Hawley is the scion of an old money family in Long Island (although the setting seems more like New England), who has fallen on hard times. After coming home from World War II, he lost his money in bad investments, and has been forced to take a job in a local grocery store. He has a wife and two teenage children, and is getting by. He actually has a somewhat managerial job, but he considers himself "just a clerk". He is also worried about the long term prospects for his family. His manager, an immigrant from Sicily, tries to order him to cut corners with customers. His wife's best friend, gives him a tarot card reading and tells him money is going to come (and also tries to seduce him). His best friend is an alcoholic who lives by begging for money. And the cute, nice little town he lives in, "New Baytown", is corrupt under the surface, with the town council all giving contracts to their friends in the type of good ol boy corruption that is common enough in small American cities.
All of this is described in the type of straight-forward prose that Steinbeck is famous for. Characters and situations are introduced in a manner that the reader can quickly understand. There are some more introspective or poetic passages, but as is usually the case, Steinbeck subordinates style in the service of making his social and moral points clear.
The plot of the book involves the previously honest Ethan, finally fed-up with people around him enriching themselves with corruption and double dealing, hatching various schemes to take advantage of the system the same way other people do. This entails both a loss of self-respect for Ethan, and a number of tricky situations as his plans take twists and turns. After all, as we know from another Steinbeck book, the best laid plans of mice and men go oft awry.
There are two interesting points about this novel: how it fits in with other Steinbeck works, and how it fits in with American literature in general. Steinbeck's most famous works were set in California and in the Great Depression. This is a book that is set in suburban New York during the economic boom of the 1950s. Rather than writing about oppression and poverty, Steinbeck is writing about the moral failures of the affluent, or at least those who are aspiring to be so. In fact, the title is somewhat ironic: the book on Good Friday, and the Easter holiday, as well as the Fourth of July, are symbolically important in it. This was the last contemporary novel that Steinbeck published during his life, and it generally isn't as well-known as works like The Grapes of Wrath or Cannery Row. I don't believe that it is due to any failure in concept or execution, but just that Steinbeck is stereotyped as a writer of the depression.
Secondly: my old paperback copy was the 8th printing of the book, just a year after its release. This book was a best seller that was serialized in McCall's and printed as a Book of the Month Club selection. It even was included in a Reader's Digest Condensed Book. John Steinbeck was a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and at the time, and now, is considered to be one of America's best writers. But at the time his books were still best-sellers, read, enjoyed and discussed by a wide swath of the population. As of this writing, it has been 32 years since an American novelist, Toni Morrison, won the Nobel Prize in literature, and recent winners (with the exception of Bob Dylan) are not well known for their broad commercial appeal. Will we ever reach a point where a popular writer will also be considered a serious writer? I would like to live in a world where Nobel-level authors writing social commentary was part of popular discourse.