Tortilla Flat
by John Steinbeck
Summary
Danny, a young paisano just home from the First World War, unexpectedly inherits two small houses in Monterey's Tortilla Flat and shares them with a loose circle of friends, Pilon, Pablo and Jesus Maria among them, who drift between odd jobs, wine and each other's company without much interest in owning anything themselves. Steinbeck builds the book from loosely connected episodes rather than a single plot: Pilon's long running scheme to buy a golden candlestick for Saint Francis, the group's halting, well meaning efforts to help a poor widow named Teresina Cortez and her children, and a string of small betrayals and reconciliations among friends who genuinely love one another even while constantly stealing each other's wine. The book turns somber only at its very end. After a wild party, Danny falls forty feet into a gulch and dies; his friends, too poor to buy mourning clothes, gather at the ruin instead, and when the house catches fire that same night, they let it burn and walk off separately into the smoke rather than try to save what is left.
Steinbeck writes the whole thing as a comic, gently mocking retelling of Arthurian legend, calling his friends' shared table a version of Danny's house and giving their aimless drinking and scheming a formal dignity the respectable town around them refuses to grant. It reads quickly and warmly for most of its length, funnier than almost anything else Steinbeck wrote, and the sudden turn into Danny's death catches most first time readers off guard precisely because the book has spent so long being lighthearted.
This was the first Steinbeck novel to sell in any real numbers, after three earlier books had gone almost unnoticed, and it made his name two years before Of Mice and Men and four before The Grapes of Wrath. Critics and readers objected almost at once that Steinbeck had turned real, struggling people into picturesque comic relief for outsiders, a complaint he answered in a foreword to the 1937 Modern Library edition insisting he had never seen the paisanos as curious or quaint, and one that has followed the book's reputation ever since.
Historical Context & Significance
Covici Friede published Tortilla Flat in 1935, and the following year the Commonwealth Club of California awarded it the Gold Medal for best novel by a Californian author, Steinbeck's first literary prize. Reviewers were largely charmed: the New York Times praised Steinbeck's gift for drollery and for turning Spanish inflected talk into gently mocking English, though the New York World Telegram found the sudden ending a little too casual to be moving.
A 1942 MGM film adaptation starring Spencer Tracy and Hedy Lamarr followed, softening much of the book's ambiguity about its characters' poverty. Tortilla Flat has never carried the weight in Steinbeck's reputation that The Grapes of Wrath or Of Mice and Men do, but it remains the book that first proved he could sell, and its regional Gold Medal remains the only prize this particular novel ever won.