The Log from the Sea of Cortez Read Online Free PDF

things. Sea of Cortez enables us to see Ricketts and Steinbeck searching for and finding whole pictures. Steinbeck’s novels and Ricketts’s more recently published essays and articles provide us with a deeper understanding of the similarities and differences in their respective worldviews.

    We read Sea of Cortez for its own sake as a first-rate work of travel literature. We read it also to understand the range and depth of Ricketts’s impact on Steinbeck’s fiction. And this permits us to see Steinbeck’s fictional accomplishments in a new and fresh light. In so doing, we see not just the absurdity of arguments raised by those who attacked this or that Steinbeck novel on the basis of his alleged belief in any particular political ideology. We see also that his thinking is not worn and obsolete, but is as current as the modern environmental movement, which it predates and with which it has so much in common. If we read and consider Sea of Cortez in all its complexity, we see John Steinbeck fusing science and philosophy, art and ethics by combining the compelling if complex metaphysics of Ed Ricketts with his own commitment to social action by a species for whom he never gave up hope, and whom he believed could and would triumph over the tragic miracle of its own consciousness.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

    Allee, W. C. Animal Aggregations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931.

    Astro, Richard. John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The Shaping of a Novelist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973.

    ——. Edward F. Ricketts. Western Writers Series. Boise, Ida.: Boise State University Press, 1976.

    Benson, Jackson J. The True Adventures of John Steinbeck. New York: Viking Press, 1984.

    Boodin, John Elof. Cosmic Evolution. New York: Macmillan Press, 1925. Fadiman, Clifton. “Of Crabs and Men,” New Yorker, December 6, 1941, 107.

    Fontenrose, Joseph. John Steinbeck: An Introduction and Interpretation. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1964.

    Hedgpeth, Joel W. “Philosophy on Cannery Row.” In Steinbeck: The Man and His Work. Edited by Richard Astro and Tetsumaro Hayashi. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1971.

    Knox, Maxine, and Mary Rodriguez. Steinbeck’s Street: Cannery Row. San Rafael, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1980.

    Lisca, Peter. The Wide World of John Steinbeck. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1958.

    Lyman, John. “Of and About the Sea,” American Neptune, April 1942, 183.

    Mangelsdorf, Tom. A History of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. Santa Cruz, Calif.: Western Tanager Press, 1986.

    Person, Richard. History of Monterey. Monterey, Calif.: City of Monterey, 1972.

    Ricketts, Edward F., and Jack Calvin. Between Pacific Tides. 3d ed. Foreword by John Steinbeck. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1952.

    ——. The Outer Shores. 2 vols. Edited by Joel W. Hedgpeth. Eureka, Calif.: Mad River Press, 1978.

    ——. “The Philosophy of Breaking Through.” Unpublished MS, 1933.

    ——. “A Spiritual Morphology of Poetry.” Unpublished MS, 1933.

    ——. “Thesis and Materials for a Script on Mexico.” Unpublished MS, 1940.

    Ritter, William Emerson. The Unity of the Organism, or the Organismal Conception. 2 vols. Boston: Gorham Press, 1919.

    ——and Edna W. Bailey. The Organismal Conception: Its Place in Science and Its Bearing on Philosophy. Berkeley: University of California Publications in Zoology, 1931.

    Steinbeck, Elaine, and Robert Walsten, eds. Steinbeck: A Life in Letters. New York: Viking Press, 1975.

    Steinbeck, John. Cannery Row. New York: Viking Press, 1945.

    ——. The Forgotten Village. New York. Viking Press, 1941.

    ——. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Viking Press, 1939.

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

    The history of the publication of Sea of Cortez is interesting and chiefly involves the issue of joint authorship. Before the book was first published by Viking in December 1941, Steinbeck’s editor, Pascal Covici, suggested that the title page read