Abstract
Connected with Steinbeck’s own film interests, he writes and helps produce The Pearl (the work could not be published as a book until the movie appeared). Again expressing his interest in Mexico, The Pearl is one of his strongest parables and one of his eventual best-sellers. In contrast, Cannery Row returns to Monterey and to the paisano culture, working men, many of Mexican or Mexican-American stock. Like Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row is meant to be humorous, with the lead character representing Ed Ricketts in his wisdom and scientific learning.
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Notes
- 1.
See Simmonds 321, note 15, for an exhaustive description of what Steinbeck called these “little interchapters.”
- 2.
A reader might add, given that Steinbeck’s mother Olive paid tribute to WASP allegiances throughout her life, that freedom from the white, middle-class world was a continuing dream of the young Steinbeck.
- 3.
Steinbeck drew as well on the fourteenth-century alliterative poem Pearl, an elegy by an anonymous poet for the death of his young daughter before she was two years old. In the 1212-line poem, the poet sees a vision of his child as she would have become. Because of this mystical vision, he plunges into a river, wanting to join her. His journey, a trip into the dark night of the soul, leads to his eventual acceptance of the child’s loss. The poem closes with his renunciation of his earthly pain: “Upon this hill this destiny I grasped,/ Prostrate in sorrow for my pearl./ And afterward to God I gave it up.”
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Wagner-Martin, L. (2017). Cannery Row and The Pearl . In: John Steinbeck. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55382-9_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55382-9_7
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