Cannery Row: The Gatlinburg of the Pacific

While not as popular as some of his other works, Cannery Row, published in 1945 but set during the Great Depression, paints a vivid picture of the fishing industry and canning industry (a way of life that is now defunct due to overfishing) . Focusing on character sketches of a diverse oceanside neighborhood in Monterey, Steinbeck included bartenders, prostitutes, immigrants from around the globe, and even a marine biologist in the story set amongst the thriving sardine canneries of the time.

It was a romanticized version of Cannery Row that I sought when I visited Monterey last month. Salinas boasts Steinbeck’s home and the National Steinbeck Center, but for me, this stretch of the Pacific represented the heart of Steinbeck’s collective work, perhaps because the novel’s opening sentence describes the street as "a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.”