Cannery Row

John Steinbeck

Feb 1993 · Sold by Penguin

About this ebook

Steinbeck’s tough yet charming portrait of people on the margins of society, dependant on one another for both physical and emotional survival

A Penguin Classic

Published in 1945, Cannery Row focuses on the acceptance of life as it is: both the exuberance of community and the loneliness of the individual. Drawing on his memories of the real inhabitants of Monterey, California, including longtime friend Ed Ricketts, Steinbeck interweaves the stories of Doc, Dora, Mack and his boys, Lee Chong, and the other characters in this world where only the fittest survive, to create a novel that is at once one of his most humorous and poignant works. In her introduction, Susan Shillinglaw shows how the novel expresses, both in style and theme, much that is essentially Steinbeck: “Scientific detachment, empathy toward the lonely and depressed . . . and, at the darkest level . . . the terror of isolation and nothingness.”

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Ratings and reviews

Cannery Row in Monterey is much more than a poem, a stink, a quality of light, a nostalgia OR a dream! Beyond the gathered and scattered and corrugated tin there is the belief in something better. Although the 1981 movie showed "Mack" and the boys as buffoons and stumble-bums; the reality is that these folks were crafty and lean survivors in very lean times. The fact that Doc was based in a very real Ed Ricketts and that Steinbeck himself was a half-partner in Western Biological during the Thirties attests to this. If you take "Log from the Sea of Cortez" and superimpose it on Joel Hedgepeth's "The Outer Shores" you will find both a Ricketts AND Steinbeck concerned with both human AND environmental repercussions. While Steinbeck worried over the future winters of "our discontent", Ricketts looked deeper into the tidepools of our ignorance in terms of poisoning the "little critters" of the tidepools. We need to listen close to Doc..and Mack..and Steinbeck. The small, scurrying critters of too many tidepools begin to resemble us. Maybe Mack & the boys had it right..considering how the strictured bulls of Wall Street have raped all our monies of late..and that maybe the "bums" of Cannery Row have something better to offer us? Like leisure...and poverty..and honesty?

Brilliant!!!

A sweet, beautiful little story.

About the author

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) was born in Salinas, California. He worked as a laborer and a journalist, and in 1935, when he published Tortilla Flat, he achieved popular success and financial security. Steinbeck wrote more than twenty-five novels and won the Nobel Prize in 1962.

Jessica Hische is a letterer, illustrator, typographer, and web designer. She currently serves on the Type Directors Club board of directors, has been named a Forbes Magazine "30 under 30" in art and design as well as an ADC Young Gun and one of Print Magazine’s "New Visual Artists". She has designed for Wes Anderson, McSweeney's, Tiffany & Co, Penguin Books, and many others. She resides primarily in San Francisco, occasionally in Brooklyn.