Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6 - MARCH 12
Chapter 7 - MARCH 16
Chapter 8 - MARCH 17
Chapter 9
Chapter 10 - MARCH 18
Chapter 11 - MARCH 20
Chapter 12 - MARCH 22
Chapter 13 - MARCH 23
Chapter 14 - MARCH 24, EASTER SUNDAY
Chapter 15
Chapter 16 - MARCH 25
Chapter 17 - MARCH 27
Chapter 18 - MARCH 28
Chapter 19 - MARCH 29
Chapter 20 - MARCH 30
Chapter 21 - MARCH 31
Chapter 22 - APRIL 1
Chapter 23 - APRIL 2
Chapter 24 - APRIL 3
Chapter 25 - APRIL 22
Chapter 26 - APRIL 5
Chapter 27 - APRIL 8
Chapter 28 - APRIL 11
Chapter 29 - APRIL 13
APPENDIX: ABOUT ED RICKETTS
GLOSSARY
INDEX
THE LOG FROM THE SEA OF CORTEZ
Born in Salinas, California, in 1902, John Steinbeck grew up in a fertile agricultural valley about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast—and both valley and coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929). After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two California books, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later collected in The Long Valley (1938). Popular success and financial security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935), stories about Monterey’s paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the California laboring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the book considered by many his finest, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Early in the 1940s, Steinbeck became a filmmaker with The Forgotten Village (1941) and a serious student of marine biology with Sea of Cortez (1941). He devoted his services to the war, writing Bombs Away (1942) and the controversial play-novelette The Moon Is Down (1942).
Cannery Row (1945),
The Wayward Bus (1948), another experimental drama,
Burning Bright (1950), and
The Log from the Sea of Cortez, (1951) preceded publication of the monumental
East of Eden (1952), an ambitious saga of the Salinas Valley and his own family’s history. The last decades of his life were spent in New York City and Sag Harbor with his third wife, with whom he traveled widely. Later books include
Sweet Thursday (1954),
The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957),
Once There Was a War (1958),
The Winter of Our Discontent (1961),
Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962),
America and Americans (1966), and the posthumously published
Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969),
Viva Zapata! (1975),
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976), and
Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (1989). He died in 1968, having won a Nobel Prize in 1962.
Richard Astro is professor of English at the University of Central Florida, where he is also director of the Eastern Europe Linkage Institute. He is the author of John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The Shaping of a Novelist, as well as studies on Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and western American literature.
