Field Notes

Monterey, CA

We love exploring Steinbeck’s Monterey, CA. His literary masterpiece, Cannery Row, often refers to historic sites and characters based on real individuals.

The novel opens with incredible details of Steinbeck’s community. The first sentences begin with descriptive language regarding scent and sound about the scenery.

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses.”

“Hazel’s mind was like wandering alone in a deserted museum. Hazel’s mind was choked with with uncatalogued exhibits. He never forgot anything but he never bothered to arrange his memories.”
Cannery Row, John Steinbeck

@steinbeckcenter

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