Cannery Row

A real street and a real friend

Cannery Row is a real street in Monterey, on the edge of Monterey Bay. In Steinbeck's time it was officially called Ocean View Avenue, and it was lined with sardine canneries. The street was renamed Cannery Row in 1958. The Center for Steinbeck Studies says the new name celebrated the novel.

Doc's laboratory was real too. Ed Ricketts, a marine biologist from Chicago, ran a business called Pacific Biological Laboratories. In 1928 he moved it to 740 Ocean View Avenue. He met Steinbeck in 1930, and they stayed best friends until Ricketts died.

The City of Monterey, which now owns the laboratory, says Ricketts was the model for Doc, with help from Steinbeck's imagination. Lee Chong's grocery across the street was based on the real Wing Chong Company. The Center for Steinbeck Studies adds that Dora Flood was based on a real madam, Flora Woods.

In 1936 a fire spread from the cannery next door and destroyed the laboratory, with Ricketts's library. He rebuilt it and lived there. On 8 May 1948 a train hit his car, and he died of his injuries three days later. In 1951 Steinbeck published an essay about him, "About Ed Ricketts."

Two parties

The story is simple. Arthea Reed's Penguin teacher's guide divides it in two: the boys' first party for Doc, which goes wrong, and their second, which works.

Around that plot Steinbeck sets short stories about other people on the Row. Frankie is a boy who cannot learn and who haunts Doc's laboratory. Henri is a painter who is not French, building a boat he never wants to finish. Mr. and Mrs. Malloy live in an old boiler on the vacant lot, and Mrs. Malloy buys lace curtains for it, though it has no windows.

Some of the short chapters are not about the Row at all. One tells the strange story of the death and embalming of the humorist Josh Billings. Another describes an old Chinese man who walks down to the beach every dusk and back every dawn. Some people think he is God, and very old people think he is Death.

Steinbeck warns the reader about this at the start. At the end of the introduction he wonders how to set a place like this down alive, and suggests letting the stories crawl in by themselves.

The tide pool

Doc collects animals in the Great Tide Pool. The animals there depend on each other, and the whole pool is only as healthy as those relationships. The Center for Steinbeck Studies reads the Row the same way: everyone on it survives by relying on everyone else.

The scholar Brian Railsback calls this one of the earliest literary themes built on a whole-environment view of life. Ed Ricketts was an early promoter of ecology, the study of how living things depend on each other and their surroundings. With the Fish and Game scientist Frances Clark, he predicted the collapse of the Monterey sardine industry.

The book also turns ordinary respectability upside down. Steinbeck calls Mack and the boys "the Virtues, the Graces, the Beauties." Dora's brothel becomes a decent, clean, honest, old-fashioned house. Doc thinks the so-called successful men are the sick ones, and that Mack and the boys are healthy.

A book readers went looking for

Critics liked it. Edmund Wilson, who was often hard on Steinbeck, said it was the Steinbeck book he had most enjoyed reading. Others thought it lightweight next to The Grapes of Wrath.

Readers went to Monterey to find it. Some searched out Ricketts's laboratory, hoping to walk into the story Steinbeck had built around his friend. The street grew into a busy commercial district, and the City of Monterey still describes Cannery Row as having both historical and literary significance.

After Ricketts died, the laboratory became the meeting place of a club of his friends. In 1957 they invited the jazz promoter Jimmy Lyons to a meeting, and the Monterey Jazz Festival grew out of it. The club gave the building to the city in 1993.

Steinbeck went back to the Row in a sequel, Sweet Thursday, published in June 1954. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II turned it into a Broadway musical, Pipe Dream, which opened in November 1955.

Cannery Row in Paris

Gallimard published the French translation in Paris in 1947 as Rue de la Sardine, meaning Sardine Street. Magdeleine Paz translated it, and the painter Mario Prassinos drew the cover.

The French title stuck to the sequel. When Sweet Thursday came out in Paris in 1956 as Tendre jeudi, its title page added "Rue de la Sardine II." Steinbeck had lived in Paris for a season in 1954, the year Sweet Thursday first appeared in English.