Cannery Row
by John Steinbeck
Summary
Steinbeck sets the novel on the actual Cannery Row in Monterey, California, among the sardine canneries, and follows Doc, a marine biologist who runs a small research laboratory and supplies specimens to universities, alongside Mack and a loose group of unemployed men who live in an abandoned fish meal shed they call the Palace Flophouse. Grateful for everything Doc has quietly done for the neighborhood over the years, treating injuries, lending money, listening without judgment, Mack and the boys decide to throw him a surprise party as thanks. Their first attempt goes disastrously wrong: Doc is delayed getting home, the party spins out of control without him, and he returns at dawn to find his laboratory wrecked, his specimens ruined, and his home a shambles. Ashamed, Mack and the group resolve to make it right and organize a second party, timed properly this time, that becomes everything the first one was not, food, music, and a genuine, unguarded warmth running through the whole neighborhood. Doc fries steaks for everyone, plays opera on his phonograph, and reads a Sanskrit love poem aloud to a room that falls quietly rapt around him, until a group of strangers burst in expecting to find a brothel and a good natured brawl breaks out that somehow makes the evening better rather than worse. The novel ends the next morning with Doc alone again, cleaning up the wreckage of a party thrown entirely in his honor, and reciting a few lines of poetry to no one in particular in an empty lab that the whole neighborhood, in its own chaotic way, has just tried to fill.
Steinbeck opens the book by comparing Cannery Row itself to a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a tone, a nostalgia, and that description sets the pattern for what follows, a loosely connected string of vignettes about the neighborhood's residents rather than a single driving plot. It reads gently and quickly, funny in its portraits of Mack's schemes and generous toward characters, drunks, prostitutes, day laborers, that most novels of the period treated only as background.
Doc is drawn closely on Edward F. Ricketts, a real marine biologist and close friend of Steinbeck's who ran the actual Pacific Biological Laboratories on Cannery Row and helped shape much of Steinbeck's own thinking about ecology and community. Viking Press published the novel in January 1945, and Steinbeck returned to the same characters nine years later in a sequel, Sweet Thursday.
Historical Context & Significance
Steinbeck, an American citizen, was eligible for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction when Cannery Row appeared in January 1945, but no prize came for it. The 1946 Pulitzer gave no fiction award at all, and nothing in the record puts Cannery Row in that year's argument.
Reviewers took it as a slighter book than The Grapes of Wrath, and Steinbeck did not argue; he said he had written it for a group of soldiers who asked him for something funny that was not about the war. Its lasting effect has been on the place itself rather than on any prize table: the city of Monterey renamed the actual street, Ocean View Avenue, Cannery Row in 1958, turning Steinbeck's fiction into the neighborhood's official name.