The Log From the Sea of Cortez (Penguin Classics) Read Free Page A

communal stews.” Over time, Steinbeck drew very close to Ricketts. They spent endless hours in Ed’s lab discussing the work of Allee and Ritter as Steinbeck worked on his novels and short stories and Ricketts studied what he called “the good, kind, sane little animals,” the marine invertebrates of the Central California coast.
     
    In time, they both succeeded. Steinbeck achieved modest successes with his early short stories, greater glory with Tortilla Flat, which won him critical recognition, and then—when he sold the movie rights to the novel for the then-magnificent sum of four thousand dollars—financial independence. In the late 1930s, his popularity skyrocketed as Of Mice and Men succeeded both as fiction and as theater, and as In Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath established him as a champion of the proletariat. Grapes was and remains Steinbeck’s masterpiece. This epic account of the plight of a family of disinherited Oklahoma tenant farmers made Steinbeck a novelist of international stature. It is the book upon which his enduring reputation as a major American writer continues to rest.
     
    Ricketts, on the other hand, worked away on his studies of life in the tidepools, taking the necessary time to maintain his prepared-slide business, which was his only source of income until 1939. That year, Stanford University Press published the results of his work in Between Pacific Tides, which Ricketts co-authored with Jack Calvin. Calvin did little more than polish Ricketts’s stilted prose into a thoroughly readable and very professional account of the habits and habitats of the animals living on the rocky shores and in the tide pools of the Pacific Coast. Some years later, Steinbeck wrote a foreword to the third edition of Tides, noting that the book “is designed more to stir curiosity than to answer questions.... There are good things to see in the tidepools and interesting thoughts to be generated from the seeing. Every new eye applied to the peephole which looks out at the world may fish in some new beauty and some new pattern, and the world of the human mind must be enriched by such fishing.” Ricketts’s years of hard work paid off. Between Pacific Tides became the definitive source-book for studying marine life along the Pacific Coast, and even today it is read by students at every major oceanographic station from Southern California to British Columbia.
     
    The Grapes of Wrath and Between Pacific Tides were both published in 1939. Both authors were left fatigued. Steinbeck had moved to the Los Gatos hills some two or three years earlier, but the two remained close friends and saw one another often. For some time they had planned to write a book together—originally, a modest handbook for general readers about the marine life of San Francisco Bay. Ricketts drafted an outline for the book, and Steinbeck (whose participation in the project has been largely unnoticed) suggested “shopping” the book to his publisher (Viking) and to Ricketts’s (Stanford University), and giving it to the highest bidder. The book was to be written chiefly by Steinbeck, said Ricketts, and would be designed “so that it can be used by the sea coast wanderer who finds interest in the little bugs and would like to know what they are and how they live. Its treatment will revolt against the theory that only the dull is accurate and only the tiresome, valuable.”
     
    Even though Steinbeck wrote a three-thousand-word preface, and Ricketts over five thousand words of text, the Bay area handbook was never completed. It did, however, provide impetus for a larger, more expansive project, the 1940 collecting expedition to the Gulf of California which resulted in the subsequent collaboration on Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research. In addition to those members of the crew who are mentioned in the volume, Steinbeck’s wife Carol made the trip, which the couple hoped would serve to help salvage a