Zoom into Monterey Library’s “Cannery Row Days” Party

William Souder, John Steinbeck Biographer

The author of Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck (William Souder, above) joins an all-star speaker lineup for the Monterey Library’s 75th anniversary publication party for Cannery Row, the “poisoned cream puff” of a novel resented by locals when it appeared but revered by readers ever since for its humorous depiction of human society—high and low—along Monterey’s historic waterfront. The six-week-long celebration kicked off on September 16 with a Zoom webinar led by veteran Steinbeck scholars Robert DeMott and Susan Shillinglaw (in photo left) and by Gerry Low-Sabado, a fifth generation Monterey native and well-known Chinese-American community preservationist. The six-week-long celebration includes lectures, films, and special events and ends on November 7 with public readings, virtual tours of Cannery Row, Monterey Bay Aquarium, and Ed Ricketts’s Pacific Biological Laboratories—the latter led by Shillinglaw and Mike Guardino of the Cannery Row Foundation—and a panel discussion of “Why We Read Cannery Row in 2020” that includes Souder; Donald Kohrs, librarian and archivist of the nearby Hopkins Marine Station; and Katie Rodgers, the pioneering editor of Ricketts’s letters, Renaissance Man of Cannery Row, and of Breaking Through: Essays, Journals, and Travelogues of Edward F. Ricketts. Registration for California’s “Cannery Row Days: A Novel Celebration” is free and open to the public (thanks to Zoom) wherever in the world COVID-19 days may have you cornered. Sessions in the series will be recorded and available for viewing at the Monterey Library website.