Proofread and edit the final essay to make it look right. Literature Essay Structure. Writing the literary essay starts with the thesis. This is the point at which you reflect the general idea about the writing you’re going to produce. It’s the primary argument that gives the essay direction limiting it from being just a bag of different Jul 22, · Cannery Row; East of Eden; Critical Analysis Essay. This essay assignment is a major step in developing the students’ critical analysis abilities. It can be modified per grade level/ability, and is a perfect introduction to scholarly papers. General Activities Jun 29, · This is the transcript of a keynote talk I gave at EYEO in Minneapolis. An adapted version appears in my book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. I’d like to start off by
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Print version of this article pdf - 82kb. Steinbeck in with his sister Mary, sitting on the red pony, Jill, at the Salinas Fairgrounds. John Steinbeck was born in the farming town cannery row essay Salinas, California on 27 February His father, John Ernst Steinbeck, was not a terribly successful man; at one time or another he was the manager of a Sperry flour plant, the owner of a feed and grain store, the treasurer of Monterey County.
His mother, the strong-willed Olive Hamilton Steinbeck, was a former teacher, cannery row essay. As a cannery row essay growing up in the fertile Salinas Valley —called the "Salad Bowl of the Nation" — Steinbeck formed a deep appreciation of his environment, not only the rich fields and hills surrounding Salinas, but also the nearby Pacific coast where his family spent summer weekends.
Never wealthy, the family was nonetheless prominent in the small town of 3, for both parents engaged in community activities. Cannery row essay was a Mason, Mrs. Steinbeck a member of the Order of the Eastern Star and founder of The Wanderers, a women's cannery row essay that traveled vicariously through monthly reports. While the elder Steinbecks established their identities by sending roots deep in the community, their son was something of a rebel.
Respectable Salinas cannery row essay the restless and imaginative young John Steinbeck and he defined himself against "Salinas thinking. To please his parents he enrolled at Stanford University cannery row essay ; to please himself he signed on only for those courses that interested him: classical and British literature, writing courses, and a smattering of cannery row essay. The President of the English Club said that Steinbeck, who regularly attended meetings to read his stories aloud, "had no other interests or talents that I could make out.
He was a writer, but he was that and nothing else" Benson Writing was, indeed, his passion, not only during the Stanford years but throughout his life. From towhen he finally left Stanford without taking a degree, Steinbeck dropped in and out of the University, sometimes to work closely with migrants and bindlestiffs on California ranches.
Those relationships, coupled with an early sympathy for the weak and defenseless, deepened his empathy for workers, the disenfranchised, the lonely and dislocated, an empathy that is characteristic in his work.
After leaving Stanford, he briefly tried construction work and newspaper reporting in New York City, and then returned to his native state in order to hone his craft. In the late s, during a three-year stint as a caretaker for a Lake Tahoe estate, he wrote several drafts of his first novel, Cup of Gold about the pirate Henry Morgan, and met the woman who would become his first wife, Carol Henning, a San Jose native.
After their marriage inhe and Carol settled, rent-free, into the Steinbeck family's summer cottage in Pacific Grove, she to search for jobs to support them, he to continue writing. During the decade of the s Steinbeck wrote most of his best California fiction: The Pastures of HeavenTo a God UnknownThe Long ValleyTortilla FlatIn Dubious BattleOf Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath To a God Unknown, second written and third published, tells of patriarch Joseph Wayne's domination of and obsession with the land.
Mystical and powerful, the novel testifies to Steinbeck's awareness of an essential bond between humans and the environments they inhabit. In a journal entry kept while working on this novel - a practice he continued all his life — the young author wrote: "the trees and the muscled mountains are the world — but not the world apart from man — the world and man — the one inseparable unit man and his environment. Why they should ever have been understood as being cannery row essay I do not know.
His was not a man-dominated universe, but an interrelated whole, where species and the environment were seen to interact, where commensal bonds between people, among families, with nature were acknowledged. BySteinbeck had found his terrain; had chiseled a prose style that was more naturalistic, and far less strained than in his earliest novels; and had claimed his people - not the respectable, smug Salinas burghers, but those on the edges of polite society, cannery row essay.
Steinbeck's California fiction, from To a God Unknown to East of Eden envisions the dreams and defeats of common people shaped by the environments they inhabit, cannery row essay.
Undoubtedly his ecological, holistic vision was determined both by his early years roaming the Salinas hills and by his long and deep friendship with the remarkable Edward Flanders Ricketts, a marine biologist, cannery row essay.
Founder of Pacific Biological Laboratories, a marine lab eventually housed on Cannery Row in Monterey, Ed was a careful observer of inter-tidal life: "I grew to depend on his knowledge and on his patience in research," Steinbeck writes in "About Ed Ricketts," an essay cannery row essay after his friend's death in and published with The Log from the Sea of Cortez Ed Ricketts's influence on Steinbeck, however, struck far deeper than the common chord of detached observation.
Ed was a lover of Gregorian chants and Bach; Spengler and Krishnamurti; Whitman and Li Po. His mind "knew no horizons," writes Steinbeck. In addition, Ricketts was remarkable for a quality of acceptance; he accepted people as they were and he embraced life as he found it.
This quality he called non-teleological or "is" thinking, a perspective that Steinbeck also assumed in much of his fiction during the s, cannery row essay. Cannery row essay wrote with a "detached quality," simply recording what "is.
Furthermore, in most of his fiction Steinbeck includes a "Doc" figure, a wise observer of life who epitomizes the idealized stance of the non-teleological thinker: Doc Burton in In Dubious Battle, cannery row essay, Slim in Of Mice and Men, Casy in The Grapes of Wrath, Lee in East of Eden, and of course "Doc" himself in Cannery Row and the sequel, the rollicking Sweet Thursday All see broadly and truly and empathetically.
Ed Ricketts, patient and thoughtful, a poet and a scientist, helped ground the author's ideas. He was Steinbeck's mentor, his alter ego, and his soul mate. Considering the depth of his eighteen-year friendship with Ricketts, it is hardly surprising that the bond acknowledged most frequently in Steinbeck's oeuvre is friendship between and among men. Steinbeck's cannery row essay style as well as his social consciousness of the s was also shaped by an equally cannery row essay figure in his life, his wife Carol.
She helped edit his prose, urged him to cut the Latinate phrases, typed his manuscripts, suggested titles, and offered ways to restructure. Inhaving finally published his first popular success with tales of Monterey's paisanos, Tortilla Flat, Steinbeck, goaded by Carol, attended a few meetings of nearby Carmel's John Reed Club. Although cannery row essay found the group's zealotry distasteful, he, like so many intellectuals of the s, was drawn to the communists' sympathy for the working man.
Farm workers in California suffered. He set out to write a "biography of a strikebreaker," but from his interviews with a hounded organizer hiding out in nearby Seaside, he turned from biography to fiction, writing one of the best strike novels of the s, In Dubious Battle. Never a partisan novel, it dissects with a steady hand both the ruthlessness of cannery row essay strike organizers and the rapaciousness of the greedy landowners.
What the author sees as dubious about the struggle between organizers and farmers is not who will win but how profound is the effect on the workers trapped in between, manipulated by both interests. At the height of his powers, Steinbeck followed this large canvas with two books that round-out what might be called his labor trilogy.
The tightly-focused Of Mice and Men was one of the first in a long line of "experiments," a word he often used to identify a forthcoming project. This "play-novelette," intended to be both a novella and a script for a play, is a tightly-drafted study of bindlestiffs through whose dreams he wanted to represent the universal longings for a home.
Both the cannery row essay and cannery row essay critically-acclaimed Broadway play which won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best play made Steinbeck a household name, assuring his popularity and, for some, cannery row essay, his infamy. Cannery row essay next novel intensified popular debate about Steinbeck's gritty subjects, his uncompromising sympathy for the disenfranchised, and his "crass" language. The Grapes of Wrath sold out an advance edition of 19, cannery row essay, by mid-April; was selling 10, copies per week by early May; and had won the Pulitzer Prize for the year Published at the apex of the Depression, the book about dispossessed farmers captured the decade's angst as well as the nation's legacy of fierce individualism, visionary prosperity, and determined westward movement.
It was, like the best of Steinbeck's novels, informed in part by documentary zeal, in part by Steinbeck's ability to trace mythic and biblical patterns. Lauded by critics nationwide for its scope and intensity, The Grapes of Wrath attracted an equally vociferous minority opinion. Oklahoma congressman Lyle Boren said that the dispossessed Joad's story was a "dirty, lying, filthy manuscript. The righteous attacked the book's language or its crass gestures: Granpa's struggle to keep his fly buttoned was not, it seemed to some, fit for print, cannery row essay.
The Grapes of Wrath was a cause celebre. The author abandoned the field, exhausted from two years of research trips and personal commitment to the migrants' woes, from the five-month push to write the final version, from a deteriorating marriage to Carol, and from an unnamed physical malady. He retreated to Ed Ricketts and science, cannery row essay, announcing his intention to study seriously marine biology and to plan a collecting trip to the Sea of Cortez, cannery row essay.
The text Steinbeck and Ricketts published incannery row essay, Sea of Cortez reissued in without Ed Ricketts's catalogue of species as The Log from the Sea of Corteztells the story of that expedition. It does more, however. The Log portion that Steinbeck wrote from Ed's notes in - at the same time working on a film in Mexico, cannery row essay, The Forgotten Village - contains his and Ed's philosophical musings, his ecological perspective, as well as keen observations on Mexican peasantry, hermit crabs, and "dryball" scientists.
Quipped New York Times critic Lewis Gannett, there is, in Sea of Cortez, more "of the whole man, John Steinbeck, than any of his novels": Steinbeck the keen observer of life, Steinbeck the scientist, the seeker of truth, the historian and journalist, the writer.
Steinbeck was determined to participate in the war effort, first doing patriotic work The Moon Is Down,a play-novelette about an occupied Northern European country, and Bombs Away,a portrait of bomber trainees and then going overseas for the New York Herald Tribune as a war correspondent. In his war dispatches he wrote about the neglected corners of war that many journalists missed - life at a British bomber station, the allure of Bob Hope, the song "Lili Marlene," and a diversionary mission off the Italian coast.
These columns were later collected in Once There Was a War Immediately after returning to the States, a shattered Steinbeck wrote a nostalgic and lively account of his days on Cannery Row, Cannery Row Inhowever, few reviewers recognized that the book's central metaphor, the tide pool, cannery row essay, suggested a way to read this non-teleological novel that examined the "specimens" who lived on Cannery row essay Cannery Row, the street Steinbeck knew so well.
Steinbeck often felt misunderstood by book reviewers and critics, and their barbs rankled the sensitive writer, and would throughout his career.
A book resulting from a post-war trip to the Soviet Union with Robert Capa incannery row essay, A Russian Journalseemed to many superficial. Reviewers seemed doggedly either to misunderstand his biological naturalism or to expect him to compose another strident social critique cannery row essay The Grapes of Wrath.
Commonplace phrases echoed in reviews of books of the s and other "experimental" books of the s and s: "complete departure," "unexpected. Set in La Paz, Mexico, The Pearla "folk tale.
a black-white story like a parable" as he wrote his agent, tells of a young man who finds an astounding pearl, loses his freedom in protecting his wealth, and finally throws back into the sea the cause of his woes.
Reviews noted this as another slim volume by a major author of whom more was expected. The Wayward Busa "cosmic Bus," sputtered as well.
Steinbeck faltered both professionally and personally in the s. He divorced the cannery row essay but volatile Carol in That same year he moved east with his second wife, Gwyndolen Conger, a lovely and talented woman nearly twenty years his junior who ultimately came to resent his growing stature and feel that her own creativity - she was a singer - had been stifled.
With Gwyn, Steinbeck had two sons, Thom and John, but the marriage started falling cannery row essay shortly after the second son's birth, ending in divorce in That same year Steinbeck was numbed by Ed Ricketts's death. Only with concentrated work on a film script on the life of Emiliano Zapata for Elia Kazan's film Viva Zapata!
In he met and in married his third wife, Elaine Scott, and with her he moved again to New York City, where he lived for the rest of his life. Much of the pain and reconciliation of those late years of the s were worked out in two subsequent novels: his third play-novelette Burning Brighta boldly experimental parable about a man's acceptance of his wife's child fathered by another man, and in the largely autobiographical work he'd contemplated since the early s, East of Eden Always I had this book waiting to be written, cannery row essay.
The detached perspective of the scientist gives way to a certain warmth; the ubiquitous "self-character" that he claimed appeared in all his novels to comment and observe is modeled less on Ed Ricketts, more on John Steinbeck himself. Certainly with his divorce from Gwyn, Steinbeck had endured dark nights of the soul, and East of Eden contains those turbulent emotions surrounding the subject of wife, children, family, and fatherhood. And I shall keep these two separate, cannery row essay.
Like The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden is a defining point in his career. During the s and s the perpetually "restless" Steinbeck traveled extensively throughout the world with his third wife, Elaine. With her, he became more social. Perhaps his writing suffered as a result; some claim that even East of Eden, his most ambitious post-Grapes novel, cannot stand shoulder to shoulder with his cannery row essay social novels of the s.
In the fiction of his cannery row essay two decades, however, Steinbeck never ceased to take risks, to stretch his conception of the novel's structure, to experiment with the sound and form of language.
Sweet Thursday, sequel to Cannery Row, was written as cannery row essay musical comedy that would resolve Ed Ricketts's loneliness by sending him off into the sunset with a true love, Suzy, a whore with a gilded heart. The musical version by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Pipe Dreamwas one of the team's few failures.
54 - John Steinbeck's Cannery Row Examined
, time: 48:34Of Mice and Men Lesson Plans | Steinbeck in the Schools | San Jose State University
Founder of Pacific Biological Laboratories, a marine lab eventually housed on Cannery Row in Monterey, Ed was a careful observer of inter-tidal life: "I grew to depend on his knowledge and on his patience in research," Steinbeck writes in "About Ed Ricketts," an essay composed after his friend's death in and published with The Log from the Jul 22, · Cannery Row; East of Eden; Critical Analysis Essay. This essay assignment is a major step in developing the students’ critical analysis abilities. It can be modified per grade level/ability, and is a perfect introduction to scholarly papers. General Activities We value excellent academic writing and strive to provide outstanding essay writing service each and every time you place an order. We write essays, research papers, term papers, course works, reviews, theses and more, so our primary mission is to help you succeed academically
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