“My son will read and open the books, and my son will write and will know writing. Kino is idealistic, and his high hope is that the pearl will allow him to educate his son Coyotito so that he can then return to be a savior of the village: (“The Pearl of the World,” incidentally, was Steinbeck’s original title for the novella.) The sudden wealth that has fallen into his hands after the idealistic Kino finds the pearl (a story based on a legend Steinbeck had discovered during his explorations of the Sea of Cortez) also brings with it sudden calamity. But the pearl in Steinbeck’s parable, a pearl “large as a sea-gull’s egg” and “perfect as the moon,” is the “ pearl of the world,” decidedly not of Heaven. Steinbeck was well acquainted with the Bible and the parable of the “pearl of great price,” which is a metaphor for Heaven. He wrote that this type of character, who possessed “kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling,” was, by these very traits, ill equipped for the capitalistic society in which they found themselves. They are poor, illiterate, and initially innocent, innocent like those characters that often wander through Steinbeck’s novels. They have a young son they dearly love, Coyotito. The Pearl (1945), then, is about a Mexican man named Kino and his wife Juana. But, after being attacked as a subversive for his suggestions that cooperation might be the way to address economic inequities in the United States, and living with his own new fame and fortune, Steinbeck began to question what fame and fortune were.
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The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Steinbeck’s long novel about “Okies” (Oklahoma farmers) trying to survive during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, brought Steinbeck fame and fortune. Two of the best are by American author and Nobel Prize-winner, John Steinbeck: Of Mice and Men, and the classic novella set in Mexico, The Pearl.
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A few, though, are part of our literary canon, like Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. The novella is also a respected form in Latin America, represented by such classics as Gabriel García Márquez’s No One Writes to the Colonel, Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, and Julio Cortázar’s The Pursuer. Although popular in Europe and Latin America, the novella is not a common form of literature in English. What is a novella? The novella is a fictional narrative generally between 20,000 and 40,000 words and it is usually centered around a single defining event. It won the Ariel – the Mexican Academy Award – for best picture, and Gabriel Figueroa won the Golden Globe for best cinematography the director, Emilio Fernández, was nominated for a Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival. That first film version of The Pearl (1948) was directed by the prominent Mexican director, Emilio Fernández.