Steinbeck based the characters on real-life people he’d met and knew in the area, most notably Ed Ricketts, whom the character of Doc was based on. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing.’ Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘Whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant Everybody. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk-heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky-tonks, restaurants and whore-houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flop-houses. Written before the War, ‘ Cannery Row’ is set during the Depression, and is, in Steinbeck’s words, ‘ a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.
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