![]() The girls from Dora’s emerge for a bit of sun if there is any. The bums who retired in disgust under the black cypress tree come out to sit on the rusty pipes in the vacant lot. The canneries rumble and rattle and squeak until the last fish is cleaned and cut and cooked and canned and then the whistles scream again and the dripping, smelly, tired Wops and Chinamen and Polaks, men and women, straggle out and droop their ways up the hill into the town and Cannery Row becomes itself again-quiet and magical. The whole street rumbles and groans and screams and rattles while the silver rivers offish pour in out of the boats and the boats rise higher and higher in the water until they are empty. They come running to clean and cut and pack and cook and can the fish. Then from the town pour Wops and Chinamen and Polaks, men and women in trousers and rubber coats and oilcloth aprons. Then shining cars bring the upper classes down: superintendents, accountants, owners who disappear into offices. Then cannery whistles scream and all over the town men and women scramble into their clothes and come running down to the Row to go to work. The figure is advisedly chosen, for if the canneries dipped their mouths into the bay the canned sardines which emerge from the other end would be metaphorically, at least, even more horrifying. The deep-laden boats pull in against the coast where the canneries dip their tails into the bay. In the morning when the sardine fleet has made a catch, the purse-seiners waddle heavily into the bay blowing their whistles. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,” and he would have meant the same thing. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody. ![]() Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. All rights reserved.:Ĭannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Today, more than thirty years after his death, he remains one of America's greatest writers and cultural figures. Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, and, in 1964, he was presented with the United States Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Later books include Sweet Thursday (1954), The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957), Once There Was a War (1958), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), America and Americans (1966), and the posthumously published Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969), Viva Zapata! (1975), The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976), and Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (1989). The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he traveled widely. Cannery Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (1948), another experimental drama, Burning Bright (1950), and The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951) preceded publication of the monumental East of Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family’s history. He devoted his services to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play-novelette The Moon is Down (1942). The Grapes of Wrath won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1939.Įarly in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with The Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious student of marine biology with Sea of Cortez (1941). Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the California laboring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the book considered by many his finest, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Popular success and financial security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935), stories about Monterey’s paisanos. During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929).Īfter marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two California books, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later collected in The Long Valley (1938). In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. ![]() Both the valley and the coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. John Steinbeck, born in Salinas, California, in 1902, grew up in a fertile agricultural valley, about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast.
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