Tortilla Flat

Danny and His Knights

Danny comes back from the First World War to Monterey and discovers that he has inherited two houses from his grandfather. This is, for Danny, an unexpected catastrophe: he had been perfectly happy with nothing. A man with property has responsibilities, which interfere with drinking wine and spending time with his friends. His solution is to move into one house with his friends and rent the other to himself—a legal arrangement of breathtaking circularity that quickly stops working when his tenants (who are also his friends) burn the second house down by accident.

The friends who move into Danny’s house on Tortilla Flat form the novel’s Round Table: Pilon, who can rationalize any act of self-interest as an act of generosity; Pablo, who agrees with whatever Pilon says; Jesus Maria Corcoran, whose heart is so large that it causes him nothing but trouble; Big Joe Portagee, who means well and achieves nothing; and the Pirate, a simple man who keeps a bag of quarters for a vow he has made to a saint. Their adventures—pursuing women, acquiring wine by any means available, occasionally performing acts of surprising grace—are structured in chapters with headings written in the mock-archaic style of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur: “How Danny’s Friends Rallied to His Bedside,” “How Pilon Was Lured by Greed of Position.”

The mock-heroic framework is not satire of the paisanos—Steinbeck’s affection for them is genuine throughout—but a way of insisting on the seriousness of their loyalty and friendship while acknowledging the absurdity of their circumstances. Danny and his knights are doing what knights do: they are simply doing it in Depression-era California with jug wine instead of horses.

Arthurian California

Steinbeck’s preface announces his intentions openly: he is going to tell the story of Danny and his friends “as a legend, as a chronicle, in the manner of those old chronicles in which Arthur and his knights moved through the wonderful world of Malory’s romance.” The Arthurian parallel is then sustained with remarkable consistency across the novel’s seventeen chapters.

Danny’s house is Camelot: a place that comes into existence through his ownership of it and that exists only as long as the fellowship holds together. The Round Table has no hierarchy—each of the paisanos is equal within the house, whatever their relations to the outside world. There are quests, though the Holy Grail has been replaced by wine or women or money for wine. There is a dissolution: just as Camelot is ultimately destroyed by the same bonds of loyalty and love that created it, Danny’s house ends in a final party of such magnificence and abandon that Danny goes out into the darkness and fights the world itself until he falls, and the house burns after his death.

What the Arthurian parallel accomplishes is a claim about the universality of the chivalric pattern—the idea that the Round Table is not a historical oddity but a recurring human form, the way that groups of friends have always organized loyalty and shared resources outside the official economy. Steinbeck finds Camelot in a Monterey hillside neighborhood and treats this discovery not as ironic but as genuinely illuminating about both Malory and Monterey.

Steinbeck’s Comic Mode

Tortilla Flat (1935) was Steinbeck’s first commercial success, the book that allowed him to write full-time, and it remains one of the two great expressions of his comic mode alongside Cannery Row (1945). They are companion texts: both are set in Monterey, both center on communities outside the money economy, both find dignity and grace in people society has written off. Tortilla Flat is earlier and rougher; Cannery Row is more polished and more elegiac. Read together they form a complete portrait of a vanished world—the waterfront Monterey of the sardine era before the canneries closed.

The racial politics of Tortilla Flat require a brief note. Steinbeck’s treatment of the “paisanos”—a term he uses for the mixed Mexican, Spanish, and Native American community on the hill above Monterey—reflects the patronizing attitudes of his era in ways that are sometimes uncomfortable to contemporary readers. He writes about them with warmth but also with the slight distance of someone observing an exotic community rather than belonging to it, and this limits the novel’s moral complexity compared to his later work.

Still, Tortilla Flat is where Steinbeck found his voice and his audience, and the Nobel Prize he received in 1962 rests as much on these early California novels as on The Grapes of Wrath. For readers who know only the tragic Steinbeck, it is an essential corrective: here is a writer whose natural mode is comedy, who finds the conditions for joy even in poverty, and who loves his characters with a specificity that survives every awkwardness of period and position.

Rating: 4.1/5 — Steinbeck’s first success and most purely comic novel, Tortilla Flat finds Arthurian fellowship in a Monterey hillside neighborhood with more warmth and insight than its mock-heroic premise might suggest—essential reading for anyone who thinks they know which Steinbeck they’re getting.