In 1930, newlyweds John and Carol Steinbeck moved into the Steinbeck family’s summer home in Pacific Grove, California. Born in 1902 in nearby Salinas, John had spent his early years exploring the natural world, from the fields of the Salinas Valley to the tide pools of Monterey Bay and Point Lobos. A confessed “water fiend,” the famed writer would spend most of his life near the sea.
When enrolled at Stanford University in the early 1920s, Steinbeck took a course in marine ecology at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove. His interest in natural science formed the basis for a deep and extraordinary friendship with pioneering ecologist Ed Ricketts, owner of Pacific Biological Laboratories in neighboring Monterey. For nearly two decades, starting in 1930, the two men engaged in long conversations about art, philosophy, music, and invertebrates, continuing their dialogue through correspondence when it was impossible to meet in person. Ricketts’s sister recalled that the artist and the scientist “sparked one another.” The friendship proved deeply significant for both men, as captured in three of Steinbeck’s works: Sea of Cortez, Cannery Row (1945), and the affectionate essay “About Ed Ricketts” (1951), written a few years after Ricketts’s 1948 death. Thinking back on his friend’s encyclopedic interests, Steinbeck wrote with admiration that Ricketts’s mind “had no horizons,” and that he ”taught everyone without seeming to.”
The men’s shared ecological perspective is evident throughout Steinbeck’s work, from the wildly penetrating study of one man’s intimate relationship with the land, To a God Unknown (1932), to the multi-leveled epic, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), to his final novel, The Winter of Our Discontent (1961) where Steinbeck ponders the “survivability” of ethical standards in America. In Steinbeck’s last published work, America and Americans (1966), he bemoans ecological destruction throughout the country. Throughout his wide-ranging, celebrated career, Steinbeck would maintain the spark he’d first felt in a remarkable place and an extraordinary friendship.