CANNERY ROW Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. 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 or corrugated iron, honky-tonks, restaurants and whore-houses and little crowded groceries and laboratories and flop-houses. It's inhabitants are, as the man said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches' by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peep-hole he might have said, 'saints and angels and martyrs and holy men' and he would have meant the same thing. John Steinbeck