Cannery Row

Cannery Row is a novel by the American writer John Steinbeck, published in 1945. It is set during the Great Depression, on the waterfront street in Monterey, California, that is lined with sardine canneries.

There is no single plot. The book is a portrait of the people in that street, among them Lee Chong, who runs the grocery, Doc, who is a marine biologist, and Mack, who is the leader of a group of men with no money and no fixed address. It is made of episodes rather than one story, and the episodes add up to a place.

The street had been called Cannery Row informally since the First World War because of the canneries along it, and it was formally given the name in 1958 in honour of Steinbeck. He was born in Salinas, California, in 1902 and grew up in the region the book describes.

Steinbeck came back to the same characters in later books. A film version was released in 1982, and a stage version was produced in 1995.