Here's a grim little story: a man wins big in the lottery. What is The Pearl About and Why Should I Care? He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962 for, among other things, his 'keen social perception.' And nowhere is this laser-sharp social perception on display than in The Pearl. And, despite political bad blood, the novel was a great success. But hey-Steinbeck had been angering people with his searing exposes of injustice for years by the time he wrote The Pearl. Many read the text as a critique of the American Dream, which meant Steinbeck wasn’t too popular among certain nationalistic, pro-capitalist crowds. only to have their entire village turn against them. The Pearl is no exception: the story focuses on a poor man and his wife who find an enormous pearl.

Steinbeck made a career of exposing the cruelty inflicted on those less fortunate (and how being 'less fortunate' essentially boiled down to being in the wrong place at the wrong time). All this experience gave him a startlingly on-point moral compass, as well as a desire to tell people about the hardships he'd witnessed.Īnd so he did.

Steinbeck wasn't above getting his hands dirty: this guy wasn't an ivory tower-type writer, but a guy who worked as a farmhand, fisherman, tour guide and even manufactured mannequins (creepy). Published in 1947, The Pearl functions as a parable about greed and evil, telling a simple story to get a big ol' point across.īut before we tell you more about The Pearl, lets give you a little more insight on how kick-butt Steinbeck was, and how The Pearl fits into his larger pattern of kick-buttitude. His initial inclination was to make the story into a film, but fortunately for the world of literature, he wrote a novella instead. because he was such an interesting man that he just went around doing awesome things like collecting marine biology specimens in the Sea of Cortez. It's based in fable: Steinbeck first heard the legend of the pearl while he was collecting marine biology specimens in the Sea of Cortez in 1940. This slim novel was penned by a genius and all-around Renaissance man named John Steinbeck. But we can't say we'll mourn the fact that you'll be forever bummed out when thinking about colonialism on the Baja Peninsula and, well, everywhere else. Hopefully, you'll come back around to liking pearls. A word of warning: this novel is about to make you think way less of those beautiful luminescent balls of sand and oyster spit that Vermeer liked his models to wear.Ī second word of warning: this novel will make you hate (and we mean loathe) the colonial history of the Americas.

The pearl book john steinbeck