Cannery Row

The Row and Its People

Cannery Row is a real street in Monterey, California, named for the sardine-canning factories that once lined it and that by the time Steinbeck wrote this novel (1945) were already in decline. The street’s ecosystem—the workers, the drifters, the small business owners, the women at the Bear Flag—is the novel’s true subject, and Steinbeck approaches it with the attentiveness of a naturalist and the warmth of someone who spent years living among these people.

At the center is Doc, the marine biologist who runs Western Biological Laboratory and is the neighborhood’s emotional and intellectual anchor. Everyone on the Row loves Doc, which is why Mack and the boys—the affectionate name Steinbeck gives to the amiable drifters who live rent-free in the Palace Flophouse above Lee Chong’s grocery—decide to throw him a surprise party. They gather frogs from a pond in Carmel Valley to sell for the cash. The party is a catastrophe. Everyone gets drunk before Doc arrives; a fight breaks out; the lab is wrecked. The second party, prepared with more care later in the novel, is a success—or as close to success as the Row ever manages.

Lee Chong is the Chinese grocer who is owed money by everyone and extends credit anyway. Dora Flood runs the Bear Flag with maternal firmness and genuine kindness. The whole neighborhood operates on a gift economy of mutual debt and mutual care that the money economy has no language for. Steinbeck watches it all with the patient affection of someone who knows that this kind of community is both precarious and irreplaceable.

Doc and Ed Ricketts

The real Ed Ricketts was a marine biologist who ran Pacific Biological Laboratories on Cannery Row and was Steinbeck’s closest friend from 1930 until Ricketts’s death in 1948. Their friendship was the most important intellectual relationship of Steinbeck’s creative life: Ricketts introduced him to the philosophy he called “non-teleological thinking” or “is-thinking”—the practice of attending to what is rather than asking what should be or what caused it—and this philosophy runs under Cannery Row as a quiet organizing principle.

Ricketts also co-authored Sea of Cortez (1941) with Steinbeck, a narrative of their collecting expedition to the Gulf of California that interweaves tide-pool biology with philosophical meditation. The marine biologist’s habit of observation—careful, non-judgmental, interested in the actual rather than the ideal—is what Steinbeck is practicing throughout Cannery Row. Doc/Ricketts does not judge Mack and the boys for their improvidence or their failures; he sees them clearly and loves them anyway.

Ricketts is the dedicatee of Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, as well as Cannery Row and its sequel Sweet Thursday. After Ricketts died in a car crash at the railroad crossing near his lab, Steinbeck wrote that he had lost “the greatest man I have known.” The grief is visible in Sweet Thursday (1954), the sequel in which Doc is trying to live without direction after the war, which is really about Steinbeck trying to write after the loss of the friend who had given his work its philosophical foundation.

Reading Steinbeck’s Comedies

Steinbeck’s reputation rests primarily on the tragic mode: Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden. But his two Cannery Row novels—Cannery Row (1945) and Sweet Thursday (1954)—represent an equally essential mode: the comedy of community, the novel that loves its characters without illusion and without tragedy.

Cannery Row is the better of the two and the more purely joyful: at 196 pages it achieves something close to perfect proportion, and the episodic structure—which some readers find formless—is actually the form of community life itself, which has no plot arc but an accumulation of small stories, minor disasters, and moments of unexpected grace. Sweet Thursday is longer and more conventionally plotted (it was adapted for a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical), and the warmth is less pure.

For readers new to Steinbeck, Cannery Row is arguably the better entry point than the more celebrated Grapes of Wrath: it introduces Steinbeck’s California, his prose style at its clearest, and his fundamental sympathy with those outside the money economy—all the qualities that will sustain a reader through the longer and more demanding works. The Nobel Prize Steinbeck received in 1962 was awarded with explicit reference to his “realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception,” a description that fits Cannery Row better than anything else he wrote.

Rating: 4.3/5 — Steinbeck’s most purely joyful novel and the perfect entry to his work, Cannery Row finds in Monterey’s waterfront community a world of such warmth and dignity that its 196 pages feel both complete and impossible to leave behind.