He and the jailer drink wine at Torelli's. After working as a mule-driver during The Great War, Danny returns to find he has inherited two houses from his deceased grandfather. The following chapter titles from the work, along with short summaries, outline the adventures the dipsomaniacal group endure in order to procure red wine and friendship.ġ How Danny, home from the wars, found himself an heir, and how he swore to protect the helpless. Most of the action is set in the time of Steinbeck's own late teenage and young adult years, shortly after World War I.

Danny's house, and Danny's friends, Steinbeck compares to the Round Table, and the Knights of the Round Table. The central character Danny inherits two houses from his grandfather where he and his friends go to live. Steinbeck later returned to some of the panhandling locals of Monterey (though not the Mexican paisanos of the Flat) in his novel Cannery Row (1945).Ībove the town of Monterey on the California coast lies the shabby district of Tortilla Flat, inhabited by a loose gang of jobless locals of Mexican-Indian- Spanish-Caucasian descent (who typically claim pure Spanish blood). Tortilla Flat was made into a film in 1942. The book portrays a group of 'paisanos'-literally, countrymen-a small band of errant friends enjoying life and wine in the days after the end of World War I.

The novel was the author's first clear critical and commercial success.

Tortilla Flat (1935) is an early John Steinbeck novel set in Monterey, California.

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