This image is the cover for the book Cup of Gold

Cup of Gold

A historical novel of the pirate Henry Morgan by the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men.

As a boy in seventeenth-century Wales, Henry hears tales of a pirate’s adventures and grows up to become Sir Henry Morgan, the notoriously vicious privateer who rules the Spanish Main and terrorizes the coasts of Cuba and America. His goal is to capture Panama—the “cup of gold”—and to possess the woman known as La Santa Roja, the Red Saint. But one of those dreams will prove impossible . . .

This swashbuckling tale was the first novel written by John Steinbeck, the author renowned for such classics as East of Eden and The Pearl. Inspired by the life of a real historical figure, Cup of Gold reveals an unseen side to this American literary giant.

John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck was an American author, born in 1902 in Salinas, California. He decided to become a writer at the age of fourteen, often locking himself in his bedroom to write poems and stories. In 1919, Steinbeck enrolled at Stanford University, but the budding writer would prove to have little use for college. Over the next six years, Steinbeck drifted in and out of school, eventually dropping out for good in 1925 without a degree. He wrote thirty-three books, including his landmark Pulitzer Prize–winning work The Grapes of Wrath (1939) the multigenerational epic East of Eden (1952), and the novella Of Mice and Men (1937). His work often dealt with the social and economic issues of the downtrodden everyman, particularly in his native West Coast.