The Log from the Sea of Cortez
First edition
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| Author | John Steinbeck |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | 1951 (The Viking Press) |
| Pages | 288 |
The Log from the Sea of Cortez is an English-language book written by American author John Steinbeck and published in 1951. It details a six-week (March 11 – April 20) marine specimen-collecting boat expedition he made in 1940 at various sites in the Gulf of California (also known as the Sea of Cortez), with his friend, the marine biologist Ed Ricketts. It is regarded as one of Steinbeck's most important works of non-fiction chiefly because of the involvement of Ricketts, who shaped Steinbeck's thinking and provided the prototype for many of the pivotal characters in his fiction, and the insights it gives into the philosophies of the two men.
The Log from the Sea of Cortez is the narrative portion of an unsuccessful earlier work, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research, which was published by Steinbeck and Ricketts shortly after their return from the Gulf of California, and combined the journals of the collecting expedition, reworked by Steinbeck, with Ricketts' species catalogue. After Ricketts' death in 1948, Steinbeck dropped the species catalogue from the earlier work and republished it with a eulogy to his friend added as a foreword.
Steinbeck met Ricketts in 1930 through a shared interest in marine biology. Ricketts made a modest living as a professional biologist by preparing and selling specimens of intertidal fauna to laboratories and universities from his small lab in Cannery Row, and Steinbeck spent many hours at the lab in Ricketts' company. Ricketts was the inspiration for the boozy, good-hearted character of "Doc", who appeared in the novels Steinbeck set in and around Monterey, and elements of his personality are mirrored by many other important characters in Steinbeck's novels.
Both Steinbeck and Ricketts had achieved some measure of security and recognition in their professions by 1939: Steinbeck had capitalized on his first successful novel, Tortilla Flat, with the publication of The Grapes of Wrath, and Ricketts had published Between Pacific Tides, which became the definitive handbook for the study of the intertidal fauna of the Pacific Coast of the coterminous United States. Steinbeck was exhausted and looking for a new start; Ricketts was looking for a new challenge. The two men had long thought of producing a book together and, in a change of pace for both of them, they began work on a handbook of the common intertidal species of the San Francisco Bay Area. The book came to nothing, but it spurred them into making a trip to the Sea of Cortez. Initially they planned a motoring trip to Mexico City as a break from their work on the handbook, but as time went on they became more interested in a collecting trip around the Gulf of California. Ricketts noted in his journal:
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