The Pearl (1947 ed.)

by Philip Gambone

"Nothing was ever wasted on Steinbeck," writes his biographer Jay Parini. "He instinctively knew how to milk his experience for what it was worth in imaginative value." In particular, Steinbeck's encounters with Mexicans and Mexican Americans provided him with experiences that he later used in his fiction. In fact, Mexico, which he visited many times, inspired one of his finest works.

In January 1944, having returned from a five-month stint as a war correspondent in Europe, Steinbeck and his second wife, Gwyn, left for Mexico, driving around by car "at a leisurely pace in the bright winter sun," Parini says. They visited the ruins of Mitla and Monte Albán and spent a week in Cuernavaca. Wherever they happened to be, Steinbeck took a few hours each day to work on a new book, a short novel he called The Pearl.

Monte Albán
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He had come up with a preliminary sketch for the plot during his marine expedition off Baja California four years earlier. (See my "John Steinbeck's Letters from Mexico," Lokkal, August 24, 2025.) There he heard, and jotted down, a story about an Indian boy who finds an unusually large pearl. Its enormous value will give him "the ability to be drunk as long as he wished, to marry any one of a number of girls, and to make many more a little happy too."

When Steinbeck returned to the States in March 1944, he continued to work on the story, fleshing it out and making it more morally complex. The following winter, he was back in Mexico, spending a month in Mexico City to work on a shooting script of this novella-in-progress. "It is a chance to do an honest picture," he told his friend "Dook" Sheffield. "I have complete control of the picture and very good people are involved in it." He was pleased that the film would have "all Mexican direction and acting and even Mexican money."

Steinbeck was again in Mexico during the spring of 1945, renting a villa in Cuernavaca, where, sitting at a small desk under a bougainvillea, he finished writing the book version of The Pearl. Filming began the following October, but he was no longer happy with the project. "It amounts to reducing your story to the most literal terms possible so that a camera can take it. And since most of my work depends on suggestion rather than literalness this is a little tiresome to me."

Orozco illustration
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The Pearl was originally published in December 1945 as a short story in the Women's Home Companion. The expanded book version, published by Viking and with illustrations by Orozco, came out in 1947, a few weeks ahead of the film.

The novella's protagonist is Kino, a young pearl diver whose canoe is the one material thing of value he owns. As he dives for oysters, Kino knows that every shell he throws into his basket might contain a pearl—"a little pat on the back by God or the gods or both"—though chance is against it. Despite being trapped in poverty, a victim of "hundreds of years of subjugation," Kino lives a simple, happy life with his wife Juana and their infant son Coyotito. Their little family abides in safety, warmth, and wholeness. In this innocent world evil also lurks—first in the form of a scorpion who stings Coyotito, and later in the person of an unscrupulous doctor who refuses to treat the baby because Kino has no money to pay.

When he finds a pearl as big as a seagull's egg, Kino and Juana are ecstatic. Previously impossible opportunities suddenly open up for them: new clothes and shoes, an education for their son, a rifle perhaps, and a proper marriage in the church. But the news stirs up "something infinitely dark and evil in the town." Juana is the first to sense the menace. "This pearl is like a sin!" she tells Kino. "It will destroy us. Throw it away."

Kino's efforts to sell the pearl are thwarted by the chicanery and greed of the pearl buyers. "There is no market for such things," one dealer tells him, and offers a sum so small that even Kino understands he is being cheated, that, in fact, pearl divers have been cheated all their lives. "I will fight this thing," he declares. "I will not be cheated. I am a man." Kino's brother, Juan Tomás, understands that for Kino to defy the pearl dealers is tantamount to defying the whole social structure of the village. "I am afraid for you," he tells Kino. Kino's defiance—which makes him "half insane and half god"—occupies the business of the final third of the novella. Steinbeck masterfully builds suspense as sinister forces close in on the little family, precipitating a horrific tragedy.

Steinbeck's strong powers of observation and description—of the watery oyster beds, of the desert landscape, of the decadent doctor's "silver chocolate pot and tiny cup of eggshell china"—abound in the novella. And while he himself called The Pearl a "parable," the book rises above the homiletic. It is a small masterpiece of literature.

When they first came out, both the film and the book went "relatively unnoticed," writes biographer Parini. Some reviewers wrote it off as "naïve" and "simplistic." Sales were mediocre. But Carlos Baker in the New York Times Book Review thought Steinbeck was "at the top of his form." The prose, Baker said, was "limpid … supple, unstrained and muscular." Baker was right. The book proved to be one of Steinbeck's abiding works.

The Pearl" was Steinbeck's last book about Mexico and Mexicans. But he did undertake two more Mexican projects—an article about the Virgin of Guadalupe for Collier's magazine (December 25, 1948) and the movie Viva Zapata! As he was mulling over the offer to write the movie script, Steinbeck wrote to his agent: "I would only make it straight. I would require a gov't assurance that it could be made straight historically. This will have to be an iron bound agreement because Zapata could be one of the great films of all time as by a twist or a concession it could be a complete double cross of the things Zapata lived and died for."

Viva Zapata! movie poster
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The film, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Marlon Brando as Zapata and Anthony Quinn as his brother Eufemio, was released in 1952. It was nominated for five Academy Awards. Quinn won for Best Supporting Actor.

Ten years later, Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. The committee cited his "realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception." In his acceptance speech, Steinbeck said that a writer "is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit–for gallantry in defeat–for courage, compassion and love." His Mexican works—especially, I think, The Pearl—even with their romanticized elements, unquestionably declare the greatness of heart and spirit in the human soul.

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Philip Gambone, a retired high school English teacher, also taught creative and expository writing at Harvard for twenty-eight years. For over a decade, his book reviews appeared regularly in The New York Times. Phil is the author of seven books. His memoir, As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II, was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the Boston Globe. His new collection of short stories, Zigzag, was published last year by Rattling Good Yarns Press. His books are available through Amazon and at "Tesoros," the bookshop at the Biblioteca.

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