The Pearl

Kino, a poor diver on the Gulf of California, finds an enormous pearl, and every person who learns of it — the doctor, the priest, the buyers, eventually his neighbours — begins to calculate what they can take. Steinbeck wrote it as a parable and said so, which is why it is short, schematic and taught so often: the mechanism by which a windfall destroys the person who receives it is laid bare rather than dramatised.

Context: John Steinbeck (1902-1968) based it on a story he heard at La Paz, Baja California Sur, and recorded in The Log from the Sea of Cortez.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the 468-title curriculum this card came from; listed in the Ages 13-99+ band under Fiction.
• John Steinbeck — the author.
• Greed — the mechanism the story turns on.