The Red Pony

The Red Pony is a book by the American writer John Steinbeck, first published in 1937. It is made of linked stories about a boy growing up on a ranch in California, and it is one of the short books that carried his reputation to a wide readership before the long novels that followed.

Jody Tiflin is ten, the son of a rancher, and his world is the ranch and the men who work on it. When his father gives him a red pony, Jody takes on the care of an animal for the first time, and the relationship that follows is the centre of the book: the routines of feeding and grooming, the pride of ownership, and the discoveries about illness, accident and loss that come with responsibility for something that depends on you. Around the boy are the adults of the ranch, including his father Carl and his mother Ruth, and the hired men whose lives he watches as closely as he watches the horses.

Steinbeck wrote the stories in the 1930s, when the agricultural West was being written about mostly in terms of adventure, and his version of it is a place where children are expected to learn quickly from events nobody explains to them. A television adaptation followed in 1973.