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Cannery Row (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)

Around the sardine factories of Cannery Row in Monterey, California, lived those who worked only when they had to, preferring to talk, fight, drink, and be lazy. These are the characters of Steinbeck's Cannery Row, who have been compared to the rogues depicted in English artist William Hogarth's engravings and in the picaresque novels of the eighteenth century.

Monterey is only a whisper away from Pacific Grove, where Steinbeck and his first wife lived in the early 1930's. The two worlds, however, are continents apart ideologically. Pacific Grove developed as a Methodist...

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