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. He died in 1948 from injuries suffered when a train struck his car near Cannery Row.

Steinbeck and Ricketts met in Monterey in the early 1930s and built a friendship grounded in tide-pool work, late-night discussions, and shared reading. Steinbeck valued Ricketts’s disciplined method of description and his preference for relations over essences. Ricketts valued Steinbeck’s capacity to restate observation as clear narrative and to test ideas through dialogue. Their practice involved visits to rocky shores at extreme low tides, careful listing of associated species, and preservation of specimens for later study. Both men adopted what they later called “non-teleological thinking,” a habit that begins with what is present and how it is arranged, before asking why in the sense of purpose.

Their cooperation produced Sea of Cortez in 1941, which combined a narrative of their 1940 collecting voyage in the Gulf of California with a technical catalog of the organisms gathered. The 1951 Log from the Sea of Cortez retained the narrative and reflective sections, removed the catalog, and added Steinbeck’s memorial essay on Ricketts. The voyage itself shaped their partnership. The collaboration influenced Steinbeck’s later fiction: Versions of Ricketts appear as Doc in Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, figures who combine technical skill with humane curiosity. Ecological patterns favored by Ricketts shaped Steinbeck’s narrative structures, which increasingly link individual fates to environmental and social systems. For Ricketts, the partnership broadened his readership and gave public form to his laboratory practice, although it also fixed him in a literary image that he did not control. Their mutual respect managed these tensions. They read each other’s drafts, annotated ideas, and treated the field journal as a shared document, even when publishers later placed Steinbeck’s name on the 1951 volume.

The memorial Appendix confirms the depth of the relationship and the method that sustained it. Steinbeck describes Ricketts’s daily routines, dislike of mysticism, and preference for classification by habitat. The portrait includes idiosyncrasies and flaws, from uneven bookkeeping to a complex private life. It remains faithful to the premise that a person is best understood through acts and relations. The Appendix functions as a eulogy, not only for Ricketts as a scientist and a man, but for the profound friendship between Ricketts and Steinbeck.