The Log From The Sea of Cortez

John Steinbeck was born in 1902 in Salinas, California, and attended Stanford University intermittently while working seasonal and manual jobs. By the mid-1930s, he had become a major American author with Tortilla Flat, Of Mice and Men, and The Grapes of Wrath. His writing drew on regional settings, labor history, and documentary habits of observation. He read widely in natural history, kept field notes, and sought technical accuracy for living systems that appear across his fiction and nonfiction. These interests positioned him to collaborate with a practicing biologist, Ed Ricketts.

Edward F. Ricketts was born in 1897 in Chicago. He studied biology at the University of Chicago as part of a broad humanistic education that included philosophy and music. After moving to the Monterey Peninsula, he founded Pacific Biological Laboratories, a commercial supplier of preserved marine specimens for schools and universities. The laboratory was a working shop and also a gathering place for scientists, artists, and writers. Ricketts coauthored Between Pacific Tides in 1939, an influential intertidal guide that organized organisms by habitat and association rather than by taxonomic lineage. The book expressed his ecological approach to distribution, community, and environmental conditions.