In the din and stink that is Cannery Row a colourful blend of misfits – gamblers, whores, drunks, bums, and artists – survive side by side in a jumble of adventure and mischief. Doc, who owns the laboratory, is the fount of all generosity and wisdom. Everybody wants to do something nice for Doc: the trouble is, he always ends up paying. Packed with invention and joie de vivre, Cannery Row is Steinbeck's high-spirited tribute to his native California.
Author Biography
Born in Salinas, California, in 1902, John Steinbeck grew up in a
fertile agricultural valley about twenty-five miles from the Pacific
Coast - and both valley and coast would serve as settings for some of
his best fiction.
In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently
enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925
without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported
himself as a labourer and journalist in New York City, all the time
working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929).
After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two
Californian fictions, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To
a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later collected
in The Long Valley (1938).
Popular success and financial security came only with Tortilla
Flat (1935), stories about Monterey's paisanos. A ceaseless
experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed course regularly.
Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the Californian
labouring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men
(1937) and the book considered by many his finest, The Grapes of
Wrath (1939).
Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with The
Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious student of marine biology
with Sea of Cortez (1941). He devoted his
services to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the
controversial play-novelette The Moon is Down (1942), Cannery
Row (1945), The Wayward Bus (1947), The Pearl (1947),
A Russian Journal (1948), another experimental drama, Burning
Bright (1950), and The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951)
preceded publication of the monumental East of Eden (1952),
an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family's history.
The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag
Harbor with his third wife, with whom he travelled widely. Later books
include Sweet Thursday (1954), The Short Reign
of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957), Once There was a War (1958),
The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels with
Charley in Search of America (1962), America and Americans (1966)
and the posthumously published Journal of a Novel: The 'East
of Eden' Letters (1969), Viva Zapata! (1975), The
Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976) and Working
Days: The Journals of 'The Grapes of Wrath' (1989). He died in
1968, having won a Nobel Prize in 1962.
