Steinbeck Country

One of the things I love when traveling is discovering history--and especially history with a literary twist. So, of course, I was excited to travel last month (with four of my kids and grandkids!) to the Cannery Row area of Monterey, California, which figures in a couple of American author John Steinbeck's stories (one of which is titled, appropriately enough, Cannery Row). The area was named Cannery Row in honor of the author who made it famous.

Cannery Row today is filled with shops, restaurants, lodgings, and attractions, but one of the shops in the area had a photo on the wall of what Cannery Row was like in Steinbeck's day--actual canneries. Huh.

A bust of Steinbeck sits at the center of Cannery Row, in a square thriving with activity (music, food, vendors, etc.). He died in 1966 at the age of sixty-four, but by that time had written twenty-seven books, including East of Eden (1952), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Grapes of Wrath (1939). He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.

That's also him sitting atop the statue above, just a few feet from the bust, along with other luminaries of Monterey (Steinbeck grew up in Monterey; his father was the city treasurer, in fact). 

My only disappointment on the trip was my inability, believe it or not, to buy a copy of Cannery Row in Cannery Row! (see here)