The Pearl
With an Introduction by Linda Wagner-Martin
Drawings by José Clemente Orozco
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in the USA by The Viking Press, 1947
First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann Ltd 1948
Published with The Red Pony in a Viking Compass edition 1965
Published in Penguin Books 1976
The Pearl published in Penguin Books 1993
This edition published in the USA in Penguin Books 1994
Published in Great Britain in Penguin Classics 2000
1
Copyright 1945 by John Steinbeck
Copyright renewed Elaine Steinbeck, John Steinbeck IV and Thom Steinbeck, 1973
Introduction copyright © Linda Wagner-Martin, 1994
All rights reserved
Introduction originally published in Woman’s Home Companion as ‘The Pearl of the World’
Drawings by José Clemente Orozco
The moral right of the author of the introduction and of the illustrator has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
Introduction
In 1939, John Steinbeck—who was considered a radical California writer, best known at the time for In Dubious Battle, his 1936 novel about unions and strike activity— found himself on the cover of Time Magazine. His new novel, The Grapes of Wrath, was a runaway success, making him the target for hate mail and FBI scrutiny, as well as commercial fame. In this long narrative about the dispossessed Okies (farmers from Oklahoma, devastated by years of drought on land that was a part of the so-called Dust Bowl) who traveled to California in search of any kind of work on profitable farms, Steinbeck seemed again to sympathize with collective strategies, to hint that communist cooperation was the way to settle economic inequities in the United States. Besides being a best-seller,The Grapes of Wrath won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1940. And it was quickly made into a film starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, a film that many viewers found objectionable (it was the first American-made movie to show a pregnant woman on camera, for example; and it was assuredly and consistently about poor people, those whose lifestyles were so primitive that Americans with enough money for movie tickets did not like to be reminded that fellow citizens lived this way).
Steinbeck would have enjoyed the fame and money that his fiction brought him, but the persecution that resulted from his writing about the poor, people marginalized by the changing industrial patterns of the times, frightened him. The modest and soft-spoken Steinbeck, who had spent years and considerable personal energy studying ocean ecology, had trouble defining himself as a subversive, an unpatriotic man who was a threat to the national interest. Seemingly at the top of his profession with the appearance of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck instead found himself going through torturous self-assessment.
By 1944–1945, when he wrote his novella The Pearl, he had pretty much decided that his view of himself was more credible than the versions the media, or the FBI, had created. But these years of personal questioning, and personal quest, had caused Steinbeck to come to terms with what wealth meant, with what an obsession with wealth (and in his case, perhaps, fame) could do to a community, as well as to the identity of the person experiencing that wealth and fame. As he had done before, he drew his personal convictions into the frame of the story he was writing, and when he chose the title for The Pearl, he intended readers to recall the biblical “pearl of great price.” In that parable, the jewel for which the merchant trades everything he owns becomes the metaphor for Heaven. Everything in a person’s earthly existence is worthless when compared with the joys of living with the Eternal Father in His Kingdom, or so the gospel of Matthew states.
In Steinbeck’s parable, however, when “the great pearl, perfect as the moon… as large as a sea-gull’s egg,” is found by the illiterate and innocent Mexican man Kino, his discovery became a way for Steinbeck to assess the American dream and to find it wanting. To become successful, to gain possessions and prominence, to become a force within a community—these were aspects of the dream that everyone recognized and few questioned. But for Steinbeck, the great notoriety of The Grapes of Wrath had been traumatic. After its publication, he turned inward and interrogated the values he had assumed he shared with most Americans. As a result of his experience, he saw that the established people in communities cared little about anyone else’s misfortunes but would do whatever they could to keep prestige and position for themselves. The lives of the simple Kino and his wife, Juana, illustrate the fall from innocence of people who had assumed that finding wealth would erase their problems. Steinbeck had earlier written about such characters in his short story “Flight” and in Tortilla Flat (the paisanos—now Chicanos—of Monterey), as he would later write about a more racially mixed group in Cannery Row (Mack and his friends). He wrote, ironically, that these characters’ good points—“kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling”—were the traits most likely to lead to failure in the dog-eat-dog capitalistic system.
Steinbeck’s life had been one of lower middle-class values as he learned the craft of writing. Born in 1902 in Monterey County, California, he grew up with Mexican American friends, and became fascinated by their lack of concern for more prestigious WASP values. He felt pulled between the two cultures. As a college student, he studied at Stanford University, majoring in marine biology, a science that attracted him by its beauty and systemic order. In 1925 he dropped out of school to work his way to New York City through the Panama Canal. There he worked as a journalist and practiced the art of writing, publishing a fictionalized life of Sir Henry Morgan (Cup of Gold) in 1929.
Returning to California, for two winters Steinbeck lived alone in the High Sierra mountains, writing and developing a philosophy that showed his respect for the symmetry and sensibility of the natural world. His personal pantheism replaced any other organized religion (in Cannery Row, his version of the Lord’s Prayer begins “Our Father who art in nature”). He then worked in a trout hatchery and on fruit ranches (laboring with Mexican Americans in the orchards), and as a surveyor, an apprentice painter, and a chemist. In 1932 he published Pastures of Heaven, a collection of short stories about the working-class people who lived in the secluded valley of that name. In 1935, after he had sold the screen rights to Tortilla Flat, his fiction about the paisanos of Monterey, he took a trip to Mexico for several months.
As a native Californian, Steinbeck was aware of how much Mexico meant to the American culture that surrounded him, and he was curious about—and interested in—the country. It was becoming clear to him that any system of morality—one of the things for which he had searched during his years working outside the privileged occupations in the States—could sometimes be more easily found among the poor than among the financially successful. If Steinbeck was cynical, his cynicism at least had its roots in his real-life experiences. One result of that Mexican experience was Of Mice and Men, his 1937 novella that became a successful play, where he again probed the tragedy inherent in lives crippled by the brutality of poverty and ignorance. In Lennie’s case, his retarded mind combined with his powerful physique led inexorably to predictable tragedies.
Between the often frightening reactions to The Grapes of Wrath and his earlier fiction, and Steinbeck’s work on The Pearl in 1944, came other experiences that helped to confirm his feelings about the values of the poor who knew little except how to be genuine, truthful, and usually moral. He served as a journalist during World War II, living in danger on the Italian front. In contrast to that bleak, chaotic time, he had one of his most idyllic periods when, in the spring of 1940, he sailed with Ed Ricketts, his friend and partner in a small biological laboratory, from Monterey up the west shore of the Gulf of California to Angeles Bay and then across to Puerto San Carlos east and south to Agiabampo Estuary. During the six weeks of their travels in Baja, collecting marine and terrestrial organisms and animals, they lived among the Mexican people, whom they liked because of their tough yet humane values. So important was this journey to Steinbeck at this time in his life, rocked by the unexpected criticism of his work and slanderous innuendos, that, with Ricketts, he wrote Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research.
What he had thought to be the peace of California life, with its live-and-let-live attitude toward people of color, came to an abrupt halt in 1942 and 1943, when Los Angeles was racked by race riots. In the east-side barrios, Mexican and Mexican American adolescents and young men had formed pachucos, or gangs, and as uniforms wore wide-brimmed hats and long-tailed coats, complete with ankle-length watch chains. Dressed in these zoot suits, the Mexican men were targets for racial discrimination. The trial of twenty-four pachucos in the summer of 1942 for the murder of Jose Diaz near “The Sleepy Lagoon” swimming hole led to many convictions, and the men had served two years of their sentences before the second-degree murder convictions were overturned for lack of evidence. Even more visible were the ten days of the so-called Zoot Suit Race Riots in June of 1943, when U.S. servicemen from the Navy training facility in the barrio attacked the zoot-suited Mexicans. Abetted by police, the servicemen went free while the Mexicans were arrested. Like the unreasonable persecution of the Okies, this turn against people of Mexican background puzzled and angered Steinbeck.
During the early 1940s Steinbeck also wrote screenplays for four films, among them the documentary The Forgotten Village, about the conflicts between modern medicine and superstitious folk cures in a Mexican town. During the filming of that project, he returned to Mexico twice, and when he took his wife, Gwyn, for a third visit, friends there suggested that he write a screenplay for a film to be produced and filmed in Mexico, a film that might create a true picture of Mexican life because it could bypass the Hollywood studios. Emilio Fernandez, Mexico’s best-known auteur, and Gebrial Figuora, his cinematographer, wanted to make the film with Steinbeck.
The Pearl, then, grew out of this invitation to write a text suitable for filming, and Steinbeck’s strategies in it are often filmic: his use of only a few characters, action pared to key scenes that involve intensely emotional interchanges, and ways for readers/viewers to visualize that emotion. He also used a cinematic point of view, with some sections presented in close-up and others at medium or distant range. Like an objectively presented documentary text, The Pearl focused on showing the reader/viewer what life for Kino and Juana was like. Some of the elements of the story are drawn from The Forgotten Village (i.e., the rapacious physician), but the source of the narrative is much more clearly the tale of the young Mexican boy who finds a pearl of great value, a legend that Steinbeck narrated in Sea of Cortez. For the next several years, through his World War II experiences and his own unhappy personal life, Steinbeck searched for a story suitable for a Mexican-made and directed film. Dissatisfied as he had become with American materialism and the pressure to be loyal to a system that oppressed the poor, Steinbeck focused on the chance to write something truthful. He also hoped his screenplay would promote understanding among races.
As he thought about the pearl story, however, the legend seemed much too simple. In the Sea of Cortez narrative, the boy finding the pearl was intent on using it for money to buy drink, sex, and clothes. The tragedy in this version of the tale was that the pearl dealers in La Paz (the ironically named Village of Peace) would not give him a reasonable price for the pearl, and after realizing that he was the victim of their collusion, he buried the jewel. Owning such valuable property, he became the target for attack, and that night he was beaten. The next night, when he stayed with a friend, both boys were beaten; later, when he traveled away from the village, he was again tracked and beaten. So he returned to La Paz, dug up the pearl, cursed it, and threw it into the sea. In Steinbeck’s words, “He was a free man again with his soul in danger and his food and shelter insecure. And he laughed a great deal about it.” While a reader might question what was comic about an endangered soul and insecure living, one of Steinbeck’s points was that, as a single man, his protagonist could take chances with life. His existence was not threatened by his giving up the fortune.
What was important about the legend as Steinbeck recalled it is that the boy had the sense to get rid of the object that was going to cost him his life. The original pearl story, then, is a parable of materialism, an example of the dangers of prosperity in a culture that thinks nothing of killing for money. But the pearl story as Steinbeck wrote it several years later is different, and it shows how complex his own state of mind was at this time of conjunction of war experience, Hollywood film experience, material success from The Grapes of Wrath and other ventures, with all the good things tempered radically by the deaths he had observed in the theater of war, as well as by the death of his marriage. The year 1944 was a time of personal change for John Steinbeck, and he was apprehensive about that change.
His personal situation influenced his creation of The Pearl. When Steinbeck wrote his version of the story, he made the young man into the older Kino, a responsible married man with a wife and child to provide for. Kino is probably named for Eusebius Kino, the Jesuit missionary and explorer in the Gulf region (it was he who proved that lower California was a peninsula—a baja—rather than an island). In Sea of Cortez, Steinbeck had shown his knowledge of many of the explorers and missionaries, both Mexican and American, involved with the settlement of the Baja. That journal too has a spiritual overlay, as Steinbeck used it to explore several sets of principles for leading a good life.
Juana, the name he chose for Kino’s wife, means “woman,” and as such she becomes the answerer, the solace for her husband’s disappointed idealism. As in his earlier fiction, particularly in the characters of Ma and Pa Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck drew male and female as complementary characters, with the woman having wisdom, common sense, and authority to balance the man’s more wistful and sometimes unrealistic hopes. With tempered sympathy, Steinbeck acknowledges that Kino is obsessed with hanging on to the pearl, and that in equating it with his pride, he fails to see that his more useful role toward his family would be protecting them. When he confesses that the pearl has become his soul. Kino admits that he will endanger his family rather than relinquish his prize, and his abuse of Juana when she tries to get rid of the pearl illustrates his growing fanaticism. In that unexpected violence, Steinbeck shows how far from any Jungian individuation Kino’s wealth has taken him—he is a monster of a male ego, not a caring and supportive husband. But behind Kino’s obviously rash behavior stands the tranquil wife, who watches over him while he sleeps and starts the fire each morning. Though all-knowing and all-caring, Juana in her role as submissive wife does not have enough power to make Kino listen to her warnings.
Juana is also the mother of Kino’s most prized possession, his son, Coyotito. Kino says that his wish in finding the pearl and recognizing its value is that Coyotito be educated, that he become a savior figure to lead his village out of the abject poverty in which it exists. For most of the novella, Kino is so filled with this urgent hope that he does not hear Juana’s counsel; her role becomes significant only near the end of the tragic tale, when the formative events have already occurred. Rather, Kino is led by an internal song he calls “The Song of the Family,” a melody that haunts him with its sound; “this is safety, this is warmth, this is the Whole.” In some respects, The Pearl is a parable of a personal journey toward that indivisible unity, or “wholeness,” described by Carl Jung. Kino’s dilemma over the pearl may also be read as a metaphor for his struggle to claim his unconscious self and integrate the “shadow” side, the femaleness within his male identity. He must come to see life, at least in part, as Juana does.
Narratively, Steinbeck complicates the parable of the pearl of great price when he adds the vulnerability of the baby, first introducing the child’s helplessness in the scorpion scene. No matter how attentive his parents are, no matter that both are within arm’s reach of the child, they cannot prevent the insect’s biting him. Once bitten, the child becomes the object of attention, an icon to test people’s values. The villagers know his worth to Kino and Juana; they understand Juana’s desire that he receive formal medical treatment, and they follow the young family to the house of the doctor. But when the white man refuses to treat the child, they also understand that money is his only god, and Kino obviously is poor. Later, when the doctor reverses his position and comes to Kino’s hut (only to poison the child and then give him an antidote—both visits serving as the means for him to look for the pearl’s possible hiding place), the community also understands that duplicity. During the night, the physician sends someone to steal the jewel. He has put the family’s real jewel, their son, at risk in the process of enabling himself to profit from Kino’s simple luck.
Extending the plot to include a child, then, creates a kind of vulnerability that putting either Kino or Juana in danger would not have conveyed. The perversion of sheer innocence, and its ravishment, sets in motion a dynamic like that of medieval morality plays. Steinbeck, well read in medieval texts, created his own version of the fourteenth-century alliterative poem Pearl, an elegy by the anonymous poet for the death of his daughter before she was two years old. In this 1212-line poem, the sorrowful poet persona sees a vision of his child as the young woman she would have become. As a result of the dream or mystical experience, he plunges into a river, attempting to join his child in her blessed, heavenly state. His journey, a plunge into the dark night of the soul, leads to his awakening, and to his eventual acceptance of the child’s loss. The poem closes with the poet’s renunciation of his earthly pain: “Upon this hill this destiny I grasped, / Prostrate in sorrow for my pearl. / And afterward to God I gave it up.” As the poet moves past his understandable grief for the loss of his child, he comes to realize the limits of human will and the confines of human consciousness. He places his trust in God.
Steinbeck transfers the resonance of the medieval legend to his own Pearl and forces the reader to see that Kino’s journey to safeguard the pearl becomes an allegory of spiritual struggle. In the course of protecting the precious jewel, Kino kills a man who is nameless, formless, a kind of evil in himself—and he does so without remorse. As he takes more and more evil into his own behavior, finally killing three more men as he rationalizes that he must perform these acts to guard the pearl that will improve the lot of his family, Kino endangers his own morality. The explorations of his namesake in the Baja wilderness are tame compared with Kino’s exploration of the levels of human sin. In the shifting value of the pearl—from great material worth into an objectification of sheer evil—Steinbeck leads the reader to see that its eventual loss will be a necessity.
Again, by focusing on the family dynamic, Steinbeck adds both life and complexity to his narrative. Kino is not an individual Everyman; he is husband and father as well as man. In fact, being parents complicates all decision making for both Kino and Juana: Kino justifies his wanting the money from the pearl to better his son’s life; his is no selfish desire. Relinquishing the jewel consequently becomes almost impossible, for to give up the money the pearl will bring means relegating Coyotito to the kind of life he and his family have always known. But in a cyclic way, with so much hope invested in Coyotito, his vulnerability frightens both his parents. Juana insists that the doctor see him; Kino, at the farthest edge of his imagining—with the idea that his son could receive an education—begins to understand personal fear. His premonition of wrongdoing, that he has taken on something much larger than he can control, starts with that hopeful idea.
Kino’s older brother, Juan Tomás, is another important addition to Steinbeck’s reworking of the original legend. The reactions of Juan Tomás support Kino’s almost inarticulate recognition of what is happening to him, giving the reader a way to verify that Kino’s understanding is accurate. Because Steinbeck’s setting for The Pearl is almost dreamlike, and certainly unspecific as to geographic location, to provide this confirming voice is necessary: This is a community, a set of people, a family; and yet for all the strength of their unity, they cannot stave off the evil that haunts Kino once he possesses the pearl. Juan Tomás as the older brother has a wider understanding: He knows that Kino has been cheated, but he also knows that they have all been cheated, through history. His is the voice of reason, the voice of continuity, and the voice of caution. Early in the novella he warns Kino that he has no model for what he is attempting—and he concludes that such ambition must be wrong, for no one else has attempted such an act.
Despite this warning, however, Juan Tomás is loyal to Kino; and Steinbeck is careful to set the inner circle of family and friends against the broader, suspect community. People in the inner circle want Kino to succeed, even though their imaginations are stunned with the thought of his undertaking. They serve as a Greek chorus to echo, and reify, Kino’s thoughts. They literally follow him to see what he is going to do next, and their presence (and the muffled echo of their words as they explain to those farther away what is happening) serves as validation. In form, then, as well as in the undercurrent of doom that pervades The Pearl, Steinbeck creates the effects of the Greek tragedies he admired.
Linguistically, however, he abjured the stately and restrained language of Euripides and Sophocles. Yet in shaping voices for his Mexican speakers, he created a dignified speech that resonates with pain. Steinbeck had a difficult task in capturing a non-English-speaking culture in his own language, yet the chief movement in the narrative occurs in the dialogue, in the voiced interchanges among the Mexican characters. Kino must ask to see the doctor. When he is refused, and his paltry eight seed pearls are handed back through the fence to accompany the lie that the doctor is out, he gives up any attempt to speak and relies on force as he bashes his hand against the wrought-iron fence that closes against him. When he asks the pearl dealer for more money, his hesitant speech again cripples him—but Steinbeck makes it clear that no matter what his eloquence, the dealers’ coalition would have kept the price low. In the moving scenes between Kino and Juana, few words are used, even though those scenes are decisive points in the narrative.
To replace verbal meaning, Steinbeck creates a technique suitable for a film script but unexpected in a written text: He uses music both to express mood and to replace dialogue. His “Song of the Family,” a positive and encouraging sound, is set against the “Song of Evil” or the “Song of the Pearl.” What happens in the struggles among the refrains anticipates the narrative conflicts. Steinbeck uses these musical motifs to suggest the complexity of Kino’s decisions, as in his description of the “Song of the Family” underlying the “Song of Danger,” when Kino is ready to take on the three trackers after he has hidden Juana and Coyotito in the cave. His slow descent into the morass of evil, naked so that his white clothing does not give him away, is surely a metaphor for the person going to meet the test of his life, for his soul, alone.
As Steinbeck forces the reader to listen for something other than language in The Pearl, he moves back toward an earlier culture of oral communication instead of written. (Jackson Benson notes that Steinbeck was reading folktales in Spanish as he began writing The Pearl, evidently looking for a tonal base that would allow him the resonance of that language without leaving the English his readers expected.) His use of the parable form was another means of insisting that Kino’s story was archetypal, common to all human interaction. Steinbeck often used literary forms in ironic ways: Here, the parable that instructs non-believers in what they must do to enter the kingdom of heaven takes on a kind of sly cynicism as it becomes a vehicle to picture a corrupt and murderous culture. The morality inscribed in The Pearl is a reverse kind of instruction: Kino has done nothing wrong except fail to recognize evil when it appears (in the object of the beautiful pearl). He can live as pure a life as he knows, but nothing will bring sanity back into his existence except getting rid of the object of beauty. His community cannot help him; neither can he help himself, unaware and unsuspecting as he is. The irony of Steinbeck’s pearl narrative is that no god appears to save Kino, his child, or his family. He must save himself—and he can do that only by reconciling the female with the male, only by listening to Juana.
His wife speaks wisely throughout the narrative when she tells him repeatedly that the pearl is evil and would destroy them, but it remains for Kino to learn to live with tragedy before he can hear her. (Steinbeck shows Juana’s broad philosophical base when he remarks that she draws on a “combination of prayer and magic, her Hail Marys and her ancient intercession.”) As the book ends, Kino’s offering her the pearl so that she can throw it away is his apology for his obtuseness, his sinful error in failing to understand that greed can corrupt the soul. Her refusing the jewel so that he can empower himself by casting it into the sea is Juana’s means of allowing Kino to reclaim some part of his badly damaged manhood. This interplay between husband and wife suggests that their marriage will survive the death of their child, but Steinbeck has also created such a poignant tenor of mourning that few readers expect either Kino or Juana to recover their earlier happiness.
The metaphoric qualities of The Pearl convey much of its meaning. For some readers, the bleak ending of the novella is despairing—and disspiriting. For others, responsive to Steinbeck’s musical motifs and the obvious harmony in the resolve of Juana and Kino to get rid of the pearl, the ending is a relief, a release, as the couple attempt to go back to their earlier life. Steinbeck suggests that Kino has learned to accept defeat, and his attitude toward the tragic death of Coyotito is the appropriate one of ineradicable grief for the loss of a human being, rather than the anger at his own loss of his male heir.
Steinbeck has also made it clear that losing the pearl is inevitable: Power accrues to those who already have it. Neither Kino nor his family nor his community have any chance of hanging on to the prize fortune has accidentally given them. Understanding that they are fortunate to have their lives, given the rapacity of most human beings (even, or particularly, the doctor), Kino and Juana are reconciled to live their poor lives with gratefulness. It is less a happy ending than it is a stoically resolved one.
The narrative that Steinbeck thought he would write was subtly changed in his telling. His recent biographer Jackson Benson sees The Pearl as a reflection of the synthesis taking place within Steinbeck. His ongoing scientific studies provided the ideas that “would form a bridge from his early work, poetic and visionary, to the so-called sociological works of the middle period, from In Dubious Battle to The Pearl.” Benson calls attention to the discrepancy in nomenclature: These works are literature, not sociology. But in them Steinbeck’s concern for the real lives of characters that might exist dominates his portraiture. His personal sympathy for the down-and-out of society—whether in the States or in Mexico—led him to draw their circumstances vividly. Steinbeck’s fiction provides convincing details, so that the reader believes in the characters’ dilemmas.
In the weeks he spent in 1944 getting ready to write The Pearl, Steinbeck found “the little book” more difficult to complete than he had expected. To a friend, he wrote that he had visited the “beautiful” ruins of Mitla and Monte Alban near Oaxaca, as well as San Miguel Allende, commenting on the strangeness of his impressions and his sense that he was experiencing a personal rebirth. After he had finished Cannery Row, and Gwyn had given birth to their son, Thom, he was able to begin work on The Pearl in earnest. Once the family was settled down and living together, Steinbeck felt that his life was once more whole, and Gwyn then helped write the theme music from what he described as “ancient Indian music long preceding the Conquest.”
Working on The Pearl was an unusual process, one that absorbed much of Steinbeck’s energies. He commented about its being so experimental that he feared it would fail; in a letter to friends, he called the story “folklore” and noted that he had tried “to give it that set-aside, raised-up feeling that all folk stories have.” Once The Pearl was finished, in late January of 1945, he wrote with his usual modesty, “It’s a brutal story but with flashes of beauty I think.”
The process of filming the work dragged on through the summer of 1945, but in 1947 and 1948, it became the first Mexican-made film to be commercially distributed in the States. The Pearl was published in 1947 to coincide with the film’s release, though it had earlier appeared as The Pearl of the World in the December 1945 issue of The Woman’s Home Companion. The reaction to Steinbeck’s nativity story—with Kino, Juana, and Coyotito as his Holy Family—was unimpressive. Although some critics today consider it one of his best postwar accomplishments, it was often dismissed when it was reviewed at all as too slight an effort to warrant serious criticism. Louis Owens speaks to that body of what he calls “contradictory criticism” of The Pearl, ranging from calling the novella “defective” to a “triumph.” In contrast, readers of the 1990s came to appreciate the work’s broadly based sympathies, its rare understanding of otherness, its insistence on a man’s achieving his own psychological health, and its eloquent lyricism that remains in the reader’s eye and ear as if it were almost a visualization of Kino and Juana’s travail.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Benson, Jackson J., ed. The Short Novels of John Steinbeck. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990.
—. The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer. New York: Viking, 1984.
Britch, Carroll, and Cliff Lewis. “Shadow of The Indian in the Fiction of John Steinbeck.” In Rediscovering Steinbeck: Revisionist Views of His Art, Politics, and Intellect, ed. Cliff Lewis and Carroll Britch. Lewiston, Va.: Edwin Mellen, 1989, pp. 125–154.
Davis, Robert Murray, ed. Steinbeck: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972.
DeMott, Robert J. Steinbeck’s Reading. New York: Garland, 1984.
Fontenrose, Joseph. “Sea of Cortez.” In Davis, Steinbeck: A Collection of Critical Essays, pp. 122–134.
Garza, Rodolfo O. de la, et. al., eds. The Mexican American Experience: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985.
Gladstein, Mimi Reisel. The Indestructible Woman in Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1986.
Hayashi, Tetsumaro, ed. John Steinbeck, The Years of Greatness, 1936–1939. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993.
Hughes, R. S.John Steinbeck: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1989.
Jung, Carl G. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, ed. Sir Herbert Read, et. al. 2nd ed., vol. 9 [1] of The Collected Works ofC. G. Jung (New York: Bollingen Foundation, Inc., 1975).
Kiernan, Thomas. The Intricate Music: A Biography of John Steinbeck. Boston: Little, Brown, 1979.
Lisca, Peter. The Wide World of John Steinbeck. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1958; rpt. New York: Gordian Press, 1981.
Millichap, Joseph R. Steinbeck and Film. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983.
Morris, Harry. “The Pearl: Realism and Allegory.” In Davis, Steinbeck: A Collection of Critical Essays, pp. 149–162.
Owens, Louis. John Steinbeck’s Re-Vision of America, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.
Simmonds, Roy S. “Steinbeck’s The Pearl: Legend, Film, Novel.” In Benson, The Short Novels of John Steinbeck, pp. 173–184.
—. “Steinbeck’s The Pearl: A Preliminary Textual Study.” Steinbeck Quarterly 22 (Winter-Spring, 1989), pp. 16–34.
St. Pierre, Brian. John Steinbeck, the California Years. San Francisco, Calif: Chronicle Books, 1983.
Steinbeck, Elaine, and Robert Wallsten, eds. Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, New York: Viking, 1975.
Steinbeck, John. Cannery Row. New York: Viking, 1945.
—. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Viking, 1939.
—. “My Short Novels.” In Benson, The Short Novels of John Steinbeck, pp. 15–17.
—. The Pearl. New York: Viking, 1947.
—. with Edward F. Ricketts. Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research. New York: Viking, 1941.
—. with Edward F. Ricketts. The Log from The Sea of Cortez, ed. Richard Astro. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973.
Timmerman, John H. “The Shadow and the Pearl: Jungian Patterns in The Pearl.” In Benson, The Short Novels ofJohn Steinbeck, pp. 143–161.