There were four children but John Ernst Steinbeck, born in 1902, was the only boy. Like other families in the valley, the Steinbecks thought themselves rich because they had land unfortunately, they could hardly afford to buy food. Steinbeck was the son of flour mill manager and Monterey County Treasurer, John Ernst, and a school teacher, Olive Hamilton, who lived in the Salinas Valley of California. Their story is a warning to restless dreamers yearning for an easy or magical solution to their problems. No pearl is worth the price Kino and his wife pay, so they throw the pearl back. As he attempts to escape those that want to take the pearl from him, he is tracked by professional hitmen and tragedy ensues. But his dream of leaving his socio-economic station leads to ruin. Calculating the profit from the gem, the diver dreams of a better life-a grand wedding, clothes, guns, and an education for the boy. In this anxious state, he finds the Pearl of the World and is able to get medical help for his boy. The legend tells of an Indian pearl diver who cannot afford a doctor for his son's scorpion sting. Fittingly, he reflected his disillusionment through a legend about a man who finds the Pearl of the World and is eventually destroyed by greed. Repentance, as attempted by his characters in his novel The Wayward Bus (1947), was not enough. He realized that none of his heroes- the GI, the vagrant, or the scientific visionary- could negotiate survival in a civilization that created the atomic bomb. Steinbeck was disillusioned in the aftermath of World War II. This longing for something better is the theme of John Steinbeck's 1947 The Pearl. Many are the tales about this phenomenon and, more often than not, the tales end in tragedy for the pleasure seeker. Whether by prayer, quest, or lottery ticket, humans have long expressed their dreams of a better life.
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