Fiction
Historic Cannery Row
Author John Steinbeck won both the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes for literature. Many of his novels were set in the Monterey Bay area and the Salinas Valley. Ed Ricketts was both a friend and mentor, who influenced the writer’s ecological view of human society.
Steinbeck asked for Ricketts’s approval for casting his friend as Doc, the protagonist of Cannery Row. In October 1944, Ricketts wrote his son Ed Ricketts, Jr.:
It’s very funny, exceedingly funny, sort of Tortilla Flat-ish, but has a better architecture and has an undertone of sadness and loneliness. It’s mostly about me, and the “Western Biological” and Wing Chong’s and Flora Woods and the bums. Because I occurred in it so obviously and so frequently, John wanted me to OK it, and tho it makes me out to be a very romantic figure and I’ll practically have to leave town after publication until things quiet down, still it’s a fine job and I approve of it thoroughly.
Marker can be reached from Cannery Row.
Courtesy hmdb.org
