Ed Ricketts, the Monterey Renaissance, and the Creation of Intertidal Ecology

Ed Ricketts (1900-1948) may be best known as the inspiration for John Steinbeck’s character Doc Ricketts in the books Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, but for marine biologists he is revered for writing Between Pacific Tides (1939), now in its fifth edition and still the best-selling title for Stanford University Press. The book, based on Ricketts’s observations of intertidal organisms along California’s central coast, was the first to embrace a community-level analysis of marine life based upon ideas from the emerging field of ecology. At the same time, Ricketts’s novel approach benefitted from his own central position among intellectuals belonging to the loosely described “Monterey Renaissance,” including Steinbeck, Henry Miller, John Cage, Robinson Jeffers and Joseph Campbell, as well as several biologists working at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove. Ricketts’s influential ideas, it will be shown, represent a productive melding of imagination and scientific investigation.

*Now in its fifth edition, BPT remains the best-selling book from Stanford University Press with well over 100,000 copies printed.