Cannery Row

The novel celebrates the Everyman, or, as Steinbeck writes in the prologue, Everybody. His characters, so lovingly crafted, are prostitutes, bums, Chinese grocers, married couples who live in boilers, and socially awkward youths. Steinbeck does not judge or condemn these people for their stations in life; he does not preach about morality or values. Instead, he depicts the men and women of Cannery Row as idiosyncratic, charming, helpful, optimistic, and mutually affirming. They certainly are flawed, as all realistic characters are, but those flaws are not debilitating, nor do they derive from a characters' profession, race, or socio-economic status. Critics laud or decry this "canonization of the castoff," but cannot argue that Steinbeck has elevated to high literature a class of people whose lives are not often valued.