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Cannery Row Revisited

SHARON LEVY

New research is reviving interest in the work of Edward F. Ricketts, a maverick marine biologistimmortalized in the writings of John Steinbeck, who foresaw the impacts of overfishing in the

Pacific more than 75 years ago. Today his scientific descendants are working tounderstand startling changes in the waters he loved.

Ed Ricketts was a beer-drinking,philosophizing, skirt-chasing col-

lege dropout. He was also a pioneeringmarine biologist who saw sea creatures ina way that in his day—the 1920s throughthe 1940s—was so unorthodox that someacademics considered him a wild eccen-tric. At a time when most biologists fo-cused on studying single animals, usuallyby pickling them and dissecting them ina laboratory, Ricketts was obsessed withseeing marine communities whole.

The structure of his book, BetweenPacific Tides, a guide to intertidal life or-ganized around environments rather thantaxonomy, was so controversial that Stan-ford University Press delayed its publi-cation for nine years. That book, finallyreleased in 1939, has become a classicand is still used by students of marine bi-ology all along the Pacific coast.

But Ricketts is best remembered as alegend created by the author John Stein-beck. Doc, the kind, bohemian hero ofSteinbeck's popular novel Cannery Row,was modeled on Ricketts. Some readersfound the book so compelling that theysearched out Ricketts' commercial labo-ratory on the Monterey, Caiitbrnia, water-

This 1935 photograph shows EdRicketts, a pioneering marine biologist,

standing in front of his lab, holding asquid nearly as long as he was tali.

Photograph: Ralph Biichsbaum,with the permission ofVicki and John Pearse.

front where he lived and worked sur-rounded by stinking, bustling sardinecanneries, across the street fi'om a pros-perous brothel. Total strangers knockedon his door, hoping to walk into the sweetfable Steinbeck had built around his clos-est friend.

Doc's generosity, like his affinity forbeer, women, and Eastern philosophies,was part of the real Ricketts. But there wasanother side to the man that becomesclearer as time passes. He was a remark-ably foresighted ecologist, at a momentwhen the new science was just takingroot. Today researchers working on Rick-etts's old stomping grounds, from Mon-terey Bay to Mexico's Sea of Cortez, areexpanding on his ideas and working tounderstand startling changes in thewaters he loved.

Exploring the Sea of Cortezin 194U, Steinbeck and Ricketts set out ina chartered sardine boat loaded with bio-logical sampling gear and bound for theSea of Cortez, which lies between theBaja Peninsula and Sonora on the Mex-ican mainland. They planned to spend sixweeks studying the creatures of a remote

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coast, little known to scientists. Bothmen were eager to get away. Ricketts'slong affair with a married woman inMonterey had just ended, leaving himdevastated. The recent publication ofSteinbeck's masterpiece, The Grapes ofWrath, had brought on a flurry of bothcritical acclaim and shocked attempts atcensorship. Steinbeck was weary of thecontroversy and of writing fiction. Hewanted his next book to be factual,focused on seashore life, both humanand animal.

By the time they sailed out of Mon-terey Harbor, the two men had spent somuch time together, exploring tide poolsand philosophizing, that they'd begunto practice a kind of intellectual sym-biosis. The book that came out of theirtravels. The Log from the Sea ofCortez, wasauthored by Steinbeck and is full of hishumor and his eye for detail. It's alsopacked with ideas that came from Rick-etts, who often saw the battle for sur-vival among tide pool creatures as amicrocosm of human society. "Our fin-gers turned over the stones," Steinbeckwrote, "and we saw life that was like ourUfe."

A section at the core of the book, theEaster Sunday sermon on the acceptanceof life as it is, was Steinbeck's riff on a longessay that Ricketts had been working onfor years. "Not all potential becomes re-ality," Ricketts wrote, citing the exampleof the sea hare, which spawns millions ofeggs into a hostile ocean so that a hand-ful might survive to adulthood. He wouldlater repeat the same phrase in a letterwritten while he was grieving the deathof his lover's young daughter.

The Western Flyer, the boat Steinbeckand Ricketts chartered, left in the after-glow of Monterey's annual sardine festi-val, a mass party held at the close of thefishing season to celebrate the oceanbounty that fueled the town's economy.During the 1930s, while most of Amer-ica suffered through the Great Depres-sion, Monterey's sardine industryboomed. More and more canneriessprang up and more boats joined thefishing fleet, and in the peak year span-ning 1936 to 1937, more than 700,000tons of sardine were landed along theCalifornia coast. Ricketts was among the

Steinbeck ami Ricketh suw iiuuiy of these colorful Sally Lightfoot crabs during theirjourney to the Sea ofCortez, but they collected very few. ''Everyone who has seen

them has been delighted with them," Steinbeck wrote. "These little crabs, withbrilliant cloisonne carapaces, walk on their tiptoes. They have remarkable eyes and

an extremely fast reaction time....When you plunge at them, they seem to disappearin little puffs of blue smoke—at any rate, they disappear." Photograph: Susan

Shillinglaw.

few who recognized that the good timescouldn't last. "Now it is warm and sunny;the canneries are going strong," he wroteto a friend in December 1938. "They willextract every single sardine out of theocean if legislation doesn't restrain them;already the signs of depletion are serious."

Signs of depletionIn spring, Isia Rasa, a table of rock liftedout of the Sea of Cortez by the long-agothrust of an erupting volcano, is full of theraucous noise unique to large seabirdcolonies. Hundreds of thousands ofbirds—more than 95 percent of theworld's population of elegant terns andHeermann's gulls—nest here every year,returning to harvest the crop of sardineand anchovy that thrives around theisland, where a pattern of upweilingbrings cold, nutrient-rich water to thesurface. The upweiling here in the midriff,the center of the long, narrow stretch ofocean that is the Sea of Cortez, creates oneof the world's most productive marineecosystems.

Enriqueta Velarde, an ecologist at theUniversity of Veracruz in Mexico, hasbeen monitoring the birds of Rasa since1979, when she first visited as a youngcollege student. Velarde almost single-handedly began successful drives to stop

egg poaching by human collectors and toremove the introduced rats that preyedon seabird nests. Now that those artificialthreats are gone, the pattern of gull andtern reproduction on Rasa is affectedmost by the abundance of small fish inthe waters surrounding the island.

"Working with Enriqueta showed methe tight connections between every partof the biosphere," says Exequiel Ezcurra,an ecologist at the San Diego NaturalHistory Museum and a Pew Fellow onMarine Conservation who has collabo-rated with Velarde on seabird researchsince 1999. When they began to crunchVelarde's decades of data on seabirdbreeding, they found a dramatic patternof reproductive failure that recurred everyfew years. These collapses correlate pre-cisely with the Southern Oscillation In-dex (SOI), a comparison of sea-levelatmospheric pressures at Tahiti and atDarwin, Australia, that is used to measurethe intensity of El Nino events in the Pa-cific. "For me it was a revelation to real-ize that the intensity of trade winds10,000 miles from the Sea ofCortez couldso powerfully affect seabirds breeding onIsia Rasa," says Ezcurra.

During strong El Nino events, the up-welling of cold water in the Sea of Cortezstops, and nutrients remain trapped in

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colder water far below the sea's surface.This affects the entire food web, and boththe numbers of sardines and the repro-ductive success of gulls on Rasa plummet.Both populations rebound once the up-welling pattern is reestablished.

An industrial sardine fleet began fish-ing the sea's midriff in 1970. For nearly 20years, as the fishing effort steadily in-creased, the tonnage of sardines landedrose along with it. Then, in 1990, thenumbers of sardines caught abruptlydropped. Two years later, the decline wascompounded by the El Nino event of1992, and the fishery collapsed. Althoughcatch levels have fluctuated up and downsince then, the size of the fish landings nolonger correlates with the amount offish-ing effort—a sign, says Ezxurra. that theextraction rate has exceeded the pro-ductivity of the sardine population.

The owners of the fleet eventually puta voluntary limit on the number of boatsthat could go out, which allowed the sar-dine population to partially recover. Con-tinued fishing pressure keeps sardinelandings generally lower than they werein the 1980s.

Terns and gulls on lsia Rasa feed on an-chovy, young mackerel, and other smallfish when sardines are scarce. In a 2004paper in EcologicalApplications,'Vdardeand her colleagues demonstrated thatthe proportion of sardines in the diet ofbreeding elegant terns [Sterim elegans)is a very accurate prediaor of the successof the sardine fishery, which starts inSeptember, only two months after youngterns fledge. The SOI is also a good pre-dictor, but Rasa's terns provide informa-tion that is fine-tuned to the sardines ofthe Sea of Cortez in a way no traditionalfishery management model can be. Inyears when the terns eat few sardines,the fishing fleet doesn't bring in many ei-ther, and much of the fleet's effort iswasted. Velarde and Hzcurra believe thatlimiting or temporarily closing the sar-dine fishery on the basis of the terns'diet, as well as fluctuations in the SOI, canhe a key to keeping the ecosystem and thelocal economy healthy.

Both Mexico's federal fisheries agencyand owners of sardine boats have re-cently begun to show interest in this tech-nique. The fleet hopes to gain certification

Hundreds of thousands of birds—morethan 95 percent of the world's

population of elegant terns andHeermann's gulls—nesl on isla Rasa

every year, returning to harvest thecrop of sardine and anchovy that

thrives around the island. In yearswhen the terns eat few sardines, thefishing fleet doesn't bring in many

either, and much of the fleet's effort iswasted. Photograph: Fulvio Eccardi.

as a sustainable fishery, and the seabirdmodel may be one of the best ways theycan regulate their take to avoid harvest-ing more than the sardine populationcan bear.

Retracing the Western Flyer's pathSeveral fisheries in the Sea of Cortez havedied out since 1940. A prime example isthe totoaba, a fish endemic to the north-ern part of the sea, which was once acommon source of subsistence for peo-ple living along the coast. Totoaba typi-cally grew three to four feet long, a singlefish providing up to 300 pounds of meat.Steinbeck described times when the West-ern Flyer encountered locals paddlinghomeward, with a giant fish covering theentire floor of a canoe. In the 1960s, theonce-common totoaba vanished, over-fished and killed off as bycatch inshrimpers' dredge and trawl nets. It isnow an endangered species, rarely seen inthe wild.

Off the coast of Sonora, Ricketts andSteinbeck visited a ship that used dredgesto pull up every living thing from the seafloor, from sponges to hammerheadsharks. The crew gathered a few poundsof shrimp from this mass of creatures,then threw the rest overboard as deadwaste— a process they repeated over andover again. Both men were appalled bywhat the shrimpers were doing. Stein-heck described them as good men caughtin a large destructive machine. Both heand Ricketts averred that dredge fishingcould wipe out local .shrimp, as well asother species. "And it is not true," Stein-beck wrote, "that a species thus attackedconies back. The disturbed balance oftengives a new species ascendancy and de-stroys forever the old relationship."

"Our own interest lay in relationshipsof animal to animal," Steinbeck also wrotein The Log from the Sea of Cortez."li'oneobserves in this relational sense, it seemsapparent that species are only commas ina sentence, that each species is at once thepoint and the base of a pyramid, that alllife is relational to the point where anEinsteinian relativity seems to emerge....It is advisable to look from the tide poolto the stars and then back to the tidepool again."

Ezcurra tries to teach his students tosee this quote as more than metaphor."Steinbeck was saying that we need tosee the complex interconnections in na-ture," he says. "Studies of the local impactsof large-scale changes like global warm-ing. El Nino events, and widespreadcoastal pollution are now leading morepeople to think in the way Ricketts andSteinbeck did. What seemed like meta-physics in their time is becoming more apart of practical, applied science."

In 2004. William Gilly, a marine biol-ogist based at Stanford University's Hop-kins Marine Station, a short walk fromthe site of Ricketts's old laboratory inMonterey, organized an expedition thatwould retrace the path of the WesternFlyer. The scientific justification for thetrip was to sample crabs, urchins, seastars, and other creatures in the sameplaces the Western Flyer's crew had visitedin 1940, to begin to evaluate the ways inwhich the intertidal ecology had altered.But Gilly and the scientists who joined

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him on the journey had a more visceralreason to make the trip: a search for thejoyful spirit of exploration that Rickettsand Steinbeck brought to the Sea ofCortez.

Gilly's group found dramatic changesat some sampling points. At Caho SanLucas, for instance, Steinbeck had de-scribed the rocky intertidal zone as"ferocious with life," teeming with a va-riety of creatures, including three differ-ent kinds of sea stars. The town in 1940was a remote outpost with a single drearycantina; the arrival of the Western Flyer'screw, who bought rounds of beer for allthe locals, was a noteworthy event.

Now the town is packed with hotels,bars, and tourist amenities of every kind,and the water offshore is crisscrossed byparty boats, jet skis, and glass-bottomedtaxis. But the rocky shore has beensmothered in sand, probably the result ofdredging the harbor to accommodateyachts and cruise ships. Gilly found fewintertidal animals, far fewer species thanRicketts had recorded, and not a single seastar.

As Gilly and his crew traveled theshores of the Sea of Cortez, followingthe path mapped out by Steinbeck andRicketts, they found a repeating pattern.Intertidal sites of great abundance and di-versity were almost always in places farfrom hubs of human population. Areasthat had been built up since the 1940s hadlost their tide pool communities in theprocess.

But the great revelation of the tripcame when they stopped following inthe Western Flyer's wake and took off toexplore the San Pedro Martir basin, indeep water north of Guaymas, Sonora.Michael Beman, a Stanford graduate stu-dent, had e-mailed Gilly satellite imagesshowing an intense tidal upweiling eventcentered near Isia San Pedro Martir. Up-wellings like this create transient high-productivity zones. "Such places areephemeral," says Gilly, "and you will notfind them on any map. But they are whereall the life is—plankton, fish, squid, andwhales. The entire food chain driving aregional ecosystem can be witnessed froma boat, simply by drifting."

William Gilly's 2004 expedition founda rich diversity of species at the edgesof Isia Cayo, a lonely, guano-covered

pile of rocks north of La Paz. Lobsterswere particularly abundant. Ricketts

and Steinbeck visited the same site in1940 and described it as bleak, with

few intertidal animals. "Perhaps theintertidal actually has improved since}940" Gilly speculates, "but it's more

likely that Ricketts and Steinbeck werebadly hungover after Easter weekend

in La Paz and just didn't feel likecrawling around in the blazing sun

that day." Photograph: SusanShillinglaw.

Of squid and menGilly and his crew found the access toIsia San Pedro Martir guarded by a groupof sperm whales, whose favorite prey isthe jumbo or Humboldt squid, Dosidicusgigas, a beast that can grow up to sevenfeet long. Ricketts and Steinbeck made nomention of either sperm whales or jumbosquid in Tlie Log, and it's likely that the biginvertebrates were rare back in the 1940s.But they've recently invaded waters farnorth of their usual range in great num-bers, reaching first Mexico, then MontereyBay and the coasts of Oregon, Washing-ton, Canada, and Alaska. The squid havebecome the focus of a major fishery in tlieSea of Cortez. During the 1990s, squidlandings there shot up from 6200 to140,000 tons.

Drifting for three days and nights inthick fog, Gilly witnessed every part of thesquid's life cycle. He watched a male andfemale in a mating embrace, collectedtiny newly hatched squid among theplankton, caught small juvenile squid ina dip net, and saw adults hunting in agroup. At night, small fish swarmed un-der a light hung off the boat, feasting onplankton. Squid gathered at the edge ofthe circle of light and every few minutesrushed the swarm of fish all at once, eachgrabbing a victim or two. The squid havethe ability to change color, from white toa dark maroon shade that camouflagesthem in deep water. "While they werehunting," remembers Gilly, "they'd besetting off a kind of fireworks display byswitching their colors. It was like lookingat a stadium when people are taking flashpictures, and you see lots of scatteredpops of light." For Gilly, these new dis-coveries of the ways of the squid, morethan any other part of the journey, con-jured the spirit of Ricketts and Stein-beck.

Many biologists have assumed thatHumboldt squid are expanding intoniches left vacant by the overharvest oflarge predatory fish like tuna and marlin.Gilly believes that is only part of the story.In studies at sea and in the laboratory, he'sshown that Humboldt squid can spendlong periods of time in waters that are al-most devoid of oxygen, happily feedingin an environment that would kill mostlarge fish.

Large swaths of the eastern Pacificcontain midwater hypoxic zones atdepths varying from 200 to 600 meters ormore. These zones are created by themicrobial metabolism of organic mate-rial sinking down from areas of high sur-face productivity. Unlike pollution-induced "dead zones" of low oxygen insome parts of the world's oceans, themidwater hypoxic zone of the easternPacific is a vita! part of a rich ecosystem.

Squid are muscular creatures with highrespiration rates, so Gilly's initial discov-ery that Humboldt squid hunt in hy-poxic waters came as a surprise. But UnaMarkaida, one of Gilly's Mexican col-laborators, has shown that in the Sea ofCortez, the squid's prime prey are smalllanternfish that make daily migrations

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The tiny squid in the box were caught by dip net off the coast ofSatita Rosalia; thelarger specimen, an adolescent, was caught with a jig. All have been identified onthe basis of genetic techniques as Humboldt squid, Dosidicus gigas. Ricketts and

Steinbeck never mentioned sighting Humboldt squid during their 1940 expedition."It seems that all life stages oj the squid are now prominent over a wide region of

the central Sea of Cortez," says William Gilly. Photograph: Clayton Gilly. Fieldresearch supported by National Science Foundation, Packard Foundation, and

Tagging of Pacific Pelagics.

to the deep-water hypoxic zone. Thesquid follow the same pattern. In the lab,the squid are capable of lowering theiraerobic metabolic rates to cope with verylow levels of oxygen, by means that re-tnain unknown, "The squid's ability tohunt in an area where there's very littleoxygen gives it a great advantage overlarge pelagic fish," says Giily. "They'vegot a vast swath of the ocean to them-selves as top predator, except for the ma-rine mammals that are chasing them."

Shifting ocean currents and patterns ofupwelling can change the shape of the hy-poxic zone over time. Gilly believes thatthe distribution of Humboldt squid fol-lows those shifts, exploiting access to low-oxygen environments whenever theybecome available. This may explain therecent invasion of the squid into thenorth Pacific, which seems to have begunduring an El Nifio event in the late 1990s.In 1998. researchers using an unmanneddeep-water submarine glimpsed big squidin Monterey Bay for the first time indecades. It wasn't until 2005, when thegiant mollusks started washing up ingreat numbers on shores from southern

California to Alaska, that scientists real-ized how far their range had expanded.

The squid had not visited Monterey inforce since Ed Ricketts walked the shore-line. In the mid-1930s, Monterey Bay'sbooming rock cod fishery was suddenlyplagued by an attack of these foreign seamonsters, which devoured fish beforethe lines could be reeled in. Commer-cial fisherman asked the state to place abounty on the squid, which they con-sidered a pestilence. Ricketts bought somespecimens from a sardine purse seinerwhose nets had come in cluttered withsquid. There is a 1935 photograph ofhim standing in front of his lab, wearinga look of awe while he holds a squidwhose body was nearly as long as hisown.

In terms of relative numbers of jumbosquid and big, predatory fish like yellow-fin tuna, today's Sea of Cortez is theopposite of the sea that Steinbeck andRicketts visited. In 1940, there were abun-dant tuna and few squid. Now tuna arescarce and squid are booming. Some-thing has changed to make these waterswelcoming to squid, especially in theGuaymas Basin, which is now the focusof Mexico's squid fishery. Gilly believesthe change may be caused by humans, atleast in part.

In March 2005, Michael Beman andhis colleagues at Stanford published areport in Nature showing that artificial ni-trogen fertilizer runoff from wheat fieldsin Sonora's Yaqui Valley, which drainsinto the Sea of Cortez, was creatitig mas-sive algal blooms oftshore. Beman trackedthe blooms using satellite imagery. Thewheat fields are heavily irrigated aboutfour times each year, he explains, andeach time heavy loads of nitrogen arewashed into the sea. Then a phytoplank-ton bloom appears within a matter ofdays. These explosions of algal growth,which cover up to 577 square kilome-ters of sea, can lead to hypoxic condi-tions in the waters below.

"The area affected by the fertilizers iswhere the squid fishing is," says Gilly."When Dosidicus find these productivezones with low oxygen associated, they in-vade like ants at a picnic table. It's possi-ble that artificial fertilizers have altered theecological balance of the entire Guay-mas basin over the last 50 years."

Shifting tidesNone of this would have shocked EdRicketts, but all of it would have fasci-nated him. He was philosophical aboutthe human tendency to warp the worldof nature. In 1948, as Monterey's sardinepopulation and the industry that de-pended on it collapsed, Ricketts wrote a

Visit www.seaofcortez.org for more information, or read

• The Log from the Sea of Cortez and Cannery Row, by lohn Steinbeck

• Breiikitig Tliroiigh: Essays, Journals, and Travelogues of Edward F. Ricketts, editedby Katharine Rodger

• Renaissatice Man of Cannery Row: Tfie Life and Letters of Edward F. Ricketts, editedby Katharine Rodger

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piece for the Motiterey Peninsula Heraldexplaining what he knew about the causesof the disaster.

He pointed out that sardine landingshad been in decline since 1937, while thefishing fleet had continued to grow. Theindustry had dug its own grave, and hegrieved for long-time fi"iends and neigh-bors who were now out of work. But hedid not fear for the sardine. "Probablywe couldn't exterminate the sardine evenif we tried," he wrote. People had driventhe dodo, the Carolina parakeet, and thepassenger pigeon to extinction, "but all wecan hope to do with the sea-going formsas the whale and the sardine is to reducetheir numbers to the point of commer-cial extinction, so as to make the indus-tries unprofitable. By continuing to takeundersized specimens and by concen-trating our fishing in the areas where theanimals gather to spawn in southern Cal-ifornia, we can come pretty close to ac-complishing this objective."

Ricketts also understood that shiftingocean temperatures and levels of plank-ton growth affected the number and dis-tribution of sardines, but in his time noone had recognized or named El Ninoor discovered the now well-establishedevidence that sardine numbers in thePacific fiuctuate in a predictable 50- to60-year cycle, driven by shifting oceancurrents.

He was poring over sardine statisticson the evening of 7 May 1948 when hedecided to take a dinner break, drove offin his dilapidated car, and was hit by afreight train coming around a blindcurve. He lingered for two days in thehospital while a legion of his Montereyfriends stood vigil. "Ed hung on so long,"Steinbeck later wrote, "that some peo-ple from the waiting room dared to gohome to get some sleep. And then, ashappens so often with men of largevitality, the energy atid the color and thepulse and the breathing went away silently

William Gilly uses pop-up satellite archival transmitting tags to study themovements of Humboldt squid. The device samples temperature, depth, and light

level and transmits the data to a satellite. Using this technique, Gilly has shown thatsquid migrate to deep-water hypoxic zones in the Sea of Cortez, following the daily

movements of lanternftsh, their primary prey. The ability to hunt in oxygen-deprived waters gives squid a big advantage over most large predatory fish.

Photograph: William Gilly.

and quickly, and he died." A few monthslater, the last of the sardine packing plantsclosed down, and the Cannery RowRicketts had known ceased to exist. To-day the former cannery buildings arecrowded with tourist shops, including aSteinbeck Wax Museum with tableauxof Doc.

More than a half-century after Rick-etts's death, sardines have at last returnedto the northeastern Pacific. "The Mon-terey fishery was built on some good yearclasses that came in the early 1930s, whensea surface temperatures were warmenough for sardines to reach high pro-ductivity zones off of California, Ore-gon, and Washington," explains RichardParrish, a fisheries biologist who helpedbuild the mode! that is now used to man-age the reborn sardine industry. Themodel sets harvest quotas based on esti-mates of existing sardine biomass andon sea surface temperatures known toaffect sardine reproduction and survival.

It's an updated version of a conceptadvocated by Ricketts and by CaliforniaDepartment of Fish and Game biolo-gists in the 1930s, which was never im-plemented before the sardine crash.

The little fish are back, but when theyreturned this time, says Parrish, they con-gregated off the coasts of Oregon, Wash-ington, and southern California. Forreasons that remain mysterious, thereare still few sardines off Monterey's coast.

Sharon Levy (e-tnaihlevyscan@sbcglobaLnet) is a freelance writer

based in Arcata, California. On a recent vbitto Monterey, she rediscovered Ed "Doc"

Ricketts as a real person whose life stretchedfar beyond the limits of Steinbeck's

fictionalized hero.

doi:IO.I641/B570103

Include this information when citii^ this material.

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