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I am giving Cannery Row 3 starts. Here are some thoughts that I posted on my blog: https://gregshistoryblog.blogspot.com...
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John Steinbeck: Novels 1942–1952
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The third volume in The Library of America’s authoritative edition of John Steinbeck’s writings shows him continuing to explore new subject matter and new approaches to storytelling. These four novels display the versatility and emotional directness that have made Steinbeck one of America’s most enduringly popular writers.
The Moon Is Down (1942), set in an unnamed Scandinavian country under German occupation, dramatizes the transformation of ordinary life under totalitarian rule and the underground struggle against the Nazi invaders. Told largely in dialogue, the book was conceived simultaneously as a novel and a play, and was successfully produced on Broadway. Although some American critics found its treatment of the German characters too sympathetic, The Moon Is Down was widely read in occupied areas of Europe, where it was regarded as an inspiring contribution to the resistance.
In Cannery Row (1945) Steinbeck paid tribute to his closest friend, the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, in the central character of Doc, proprietor of the Western Biological Laboratory and spiritual and financial mainstay of a cast of philosophical drifters and hangers-on. The comic and bawdy evocation of Monterey’s sardine-canning district—"a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream"—has made this one of the most popular of all of Steinbeck’s novels.
Steinbeck’s long involvement with Mexican culture is distilled in The Pearl (1947). Expanding on an anecdote he heard in Baja California about a local boy who had found a pearl of unusual size, Steinbeck turned it into a parable of the corrupting influence of sudden wealth. The Pearl appears here with the original illustrations by José Clemente Orozco.
Ambitious in scale and original in structure, East of Eden (1952) recounts the violent and emotionally turbulent history of a Salinas Valley family through several generations. Drawing on Biblical parallels, encompassing a period stretching from the Civil War to World War I, and incorporating, as counterpoint to the central story, some of the actual history of Steinbeck’s mother’s family, East of Eden is an epic that explores the writer’s deepest and most anguished concerns within a landscape that for him had mythic resonance. (East of Eden was a recent selection of Oprah’s Book Club.)
The Moon Is Down (1942), set in an unnamed Scandinavian country under German occupation, dramatizes the transformation of ordinary life under totalitarian rule and the underground struggle against the Nazi invaders. Told largely in dialogue, the book was conceived simultaneously as a novel and a play, and was successfully produced on Broadway. Although some American critics found its treatment of the German characters too sympathetic, The Moon Is Down was widely read in occupied areas of Europe, where it was regarded as an inspiring contribution to the resistance.
In Cannery Row (1945) Steinbeck paid tribute to his closest friend, the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, in the central character of Doc, proprietor of the Western Biological Laboratory and spiritual and financial mainstay of a cast of philosophical drifters and hangers-on. The comic and bawdy evocation of Monterey’s sardine-canning district—"a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream"—has made this one of the most popular of all of Steinbeck’s novels.
Steinbeck’s long involvement with Mexican culture is distilled in The Pearl (1947). Expanding on an anecdote he heard in Baja California about a local boy who had found a pearl of unusual size, Steinbeck turned it into a parable of the corrupting influence of sudden wealth. The Pearl appears here with the original illustrations by José Clemente Orozco.
Ambitious in scale and original in structure, East of Eden (1952) recounts the violent and emotionally turbulent history of a Salinas Valley family through several generations. Drawing on Biblical parallels, encompassing a period stretching from the Civil War to World War I, and incorporating, as counterpoint to the central story, some of the actual history of Steinbeck’s mother’s family, East of Eden is an epic that explores the writer’s deepest and most anguished concerns within a landscape that for him had mythic resonance. (East of Eden was a recent selection of Oprah’s Book Club.)
983 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1,1976
This edition
- Format
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983 pages, Hardcover
- Published
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February 18, 2002 by Library of America
- ISBN
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9781931082075
- ASIN
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1931082073
- Language
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English
About the author
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John Ernst Steinbeck was an American writer. He won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception". He has been called "a giant of American letters."
During his writing career, he authored 33 books, with one book coauthored alongside Edward F. Ricketts, including 16 novels, six non-fiction books, and two collections of short stories. He is widely known for the comic novels Tortilla Flat (1935) and Cannery Row (1945), the multi-generation epic East of Eden (1952), and the novellas The Red Pony (1933) and Of Mice and Men (1937). The Pulitzer Prize–winning The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is considered Steinbeck's masterpiece and part of the American literary canon. By the 75th anniversary of its publishing date, it had sold 14 million copies.
Most of Steinbeck's work is set in central California, particularly in the Salinas Valley and the California Coast Ranges region. His works frequently explored the themes of fate and injustice, especially as applied to downtrodden or everyman protagonists.
During his writing career, he authored 33 books, with one book coauthored alongside Edward F. Ricketts, including 16 novels, six non-fiction books, and two collections of short stories. He is widely known for the comic novels Tortilla Flat (1935) and Cannery Row (1945), the multi-generation epic East of Eden (1952), and the novellas The Red Pony (1933) and Of Mice and Men (1937). The Pulitzer Prize–winning The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is considered Steinbeck's masterpiece and part of the American literary canon. By the 75th anniversary of its publishing date, it had sold 14 million copies.
Most of Steinbeck's work is set in central California, particularly in the Salinas Valley and the California Coast Ranges region. His works frequently explored the themes of fate and injustice, especially as applied to downtrodden or everyman protagonists.
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Moon Is Down:-
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Cannary Row:-
About the down and out and small fry and the manual labour workers and so forth, and their lives -
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The Pearl:-
One of the shortest and yet one of the best of this writer, which is saying a lot. How a poor person who is given a hand by fortune is not allowed to have it by social hounds, until he comes to a decision about what is best for his family.
Gets to heart.
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East of Eden:-
John Steinbeck is not only one of the most famous writers, and generally also a very respected one, but more than anything he transcends often from good writer to a great one. This is one of the works that is evidence of his quality that is at once magical and great both.
East Of Eden rises above the mundane and the unusual, the common and the evil, the different characters that it describes, by the good and the superlative, the aspiring human spirit and the calm, comprehending one; the courage of one and the silent tragedy of another.
It is not just the mirroring of Adam and Charles with slightly skewed images in Aaron and Caleb, and the questionable source of the money fo Adam's father mirrored in the beyond question source of Cathy's - it is the whole lot of people.
Especially Samuel and his whole clan, on one hand, with Adam's chinese housekeeper and cook on the other with his elders who went through years of learning to ponder on a question that had nothing to do with their ancestral culture. And found the answer, too!
It is Olive, with her stoic encouragement of a pilot she thought was in trouble; her sister who spread delight and peace and joy like a delicate but definite perfume in hearts and lives and brought smiles of expectation to those that expected to meet her, and herself died selently of a heartbreak. Another one who married an inventor, who went on trying, at the expense of making money - in fact spending all he had for his experiments.
Samuel's horse who had a grand name because he had nothing else. His wife who cared for her large family with the very little that their land could provide, and did not worry, only worked and provided and organised. Samuel who knew that Adam's Chinese housekeeper was more literate and erudite than his pretense to the contrary for sake of conforming to the local social prejudice, in order to blend into the background.
So many charcters unforgettable - and so many lessons implicit and otherwise.
Of course, one may complain Steinbeck went with the more socially acceptable norm, in depicting evil in the accepted form in prevalent cultural prejudicial terms of Christian and Islamic heritage, by personifying it as a female - while evil rages far more often and far more visibly out there in garb of male gender. Think nazis, think Stalin, think kkk, think paedophiles and other abusers.
But one cannot expect everything from everyone, and if Steinbeck did not rise above all of his upbringing limitations, he was only human.
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.............................................................
Cannary Row:-
About the down and out and small fry and the manual labour workers and so forth, and their lives -
............................................................................................
The Pearl:-
One of the shortest and yet one of the best of this writer, which is saying a lot. How a poor person who is given a hand by fortune is not allowed to have it by social hounds, until he comes to a decision about what is best for his family.
Gets to heart.
..................................................................
East of Eden:-
John Steinbeck is not only one of the most famous writers, and generally also a very respected one, but more than anything he transcends often from good writer to a great one. This is one of the works that is evidence of his quality that is at once magical and great both.
East Of Eden rises above the mundane and the unusual, the common and the evil, the different characters that it describes, by the good and the superlative, the aspiring human spirit and the calm, comprehending one; the courage of one and the silent tragedy of another.
It is not just the mirroring of Adam and Charles with slightly skewed images in Aaron and Caleb, and the questionable source of the money fo Adam's father mirrored in the beyond question source of Cathy's - it is the whole lot of people.
Especially Samuel and his whole clan, on one hand, with Adam's chinese housekeeper and cook on the other with his elders who went through years of learning to ponder on a question that had nothing to do with their ancestral culture. And found the answer, too!
It is Olive, with her stoic encouragement of a pilot she thought was in trouble; her sister who spread delight and peace and joy like a delicate but definite perfume in hearts and lives and brought smiles of expectation to those that expected to meet her, and herself died selently of a heartbreak. Another one who married an inventor, who went on trying, at the expense of making money - in fact spending all he had for his experiments.
Samuel's horse who had a grand name because he had nothing else. His wife who cared for her large family with the very little that their land could provide, and did not worry, only worked and provided and organised. Samuel who knew that Adam's Chinese housekeeper was more literate and erudite than his pretense to the contrary for sake of conforming to the local social prejudice, in order to blend into the background.
So many charcters unforgettable - and so many lessons implicit and otherwise.
Of course, one may complain Steinbeck went with the more socially acceptable norm, in depicting evil in the accepted form in prevalent cultural prejudicial terms of Christian and Islamic heritage, by personifying it as a female - while evil rages far more often and far more visibly out there in garb of male gender. Think nazis, think Stalin, think kkk, think paedophiles and other abusers.
But one cannot expect everything from everyone, and if Steinbeck did not rise above all of his upbringing limitations, he was only human.
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Oddly, Cannery Row is my favorite Jack London story. It's extremely sentimental, and apparently a tribute to a friend of his from Monterey. I still need to finish East of Eden.
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reading Cannery Row.
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Doc, Mack & the boys, Lee Chong, Dora. Great parties--outrageous frog hunt and consequences LOL[return]Brilliant; the writing first struck me as the essence of masculinity--not in the flamboyant Hollywood way, but in the rock solid knowledge that this is a man in whose hands you can relax. It was an odd reaction given the subject matter, but it was my first Steinbeck at the time and the feeling was palpable.[return][return]These people are so real, I'd know them on the street.
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Read The Pearl & East of Eden. Both 3 stars.
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Read the Moon Is Down
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classic literature,fiction,epic literature,family,historical fiction,cain and abel,California,brothers,favorite
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