John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: the shaping of a novelist

Edward F. Ricketts, a marine biologist who lived on the Monterey waterfront in California, was a close friend of John Steinbeck, the novelist. As Professor Astro makes clear, no analysis of Steinbeck’s writing can proceed without a careful study of the life, work, and ideas of Ricketts, who was Steinbeck’s closest personal and intellectual companion for nearly two decades.

Ricketts went to California from Chicago in 1923, and from that time until his death in 1948 he operated a biological supply house at Pacific Grove. Steinbeck and Ricketts met in 1930 and struck an immediate friendship. Together they planned a handbook on the marine invertebrates of the San Francisco Bay region. Although this project was never carried out, it paved the way for another venture, a collecting expedition to the Gulf of California which resulted in their collaboration on Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research, the published record of that trip. As Professor Astro points out, Ricketts served, in varying degrees, as the source of characters in six of Steinbeck’s novels and novelettes and one short story. Perhaps more importantly, the author shows that many of Steinbeck’s central thematic tenets were provided by Ricketts’ passion for holistic and ecological thinking, his associational beliefs about the behavior of men and animals in groups, and his disdain for the acquisition of material wealth. But, he warns, "to say that all of Steinbeck’s concern with science in general and with marine biology in particular came directly from Ricketts is to distort the facts."

By analyzing the range and depth of Ricketts’ impact on Steinbeck’s fiction, this book places a major writer in fresh perspective.

Richard Astro is an associate professor of English at Oregon State University.