The actual Monterey location Steinbeck was writing about, known casually as Ocean View Avenue, was later renamed "Cannery Row" in honor of the book.

In an effort to return to Doc's good graces, Mack and the boys decide to throw another party—but make it work this time.

Characters include Lee Chong, the operator of the neighborhood grocery store, "Lee Chong's Heavenly Flower Grocery"; Doc, a marine biologist at Western Biological Laboratories, based on Steinbeck's friend Ed Ricketts,[2] to whom Steinbeck dedicated the novel; Dora Flood, the owner and operator of the Bear Flag Restaurant; Mack, leader of a group of men called Mack and the boys; Hazel, a young man living with Mack and the boys in the Palace Flophouse; Eddie, a part-time bartender living at the Palace Flophouse, who supplies the boys with "hooch" left in patrons' glasses at Ida's Bar; and an enigmatic figure known as "the Chinaman".

Lee Chong could very easily go after the people in Cannery Row and collect on the debts he is owed, but he chooses instead to let the money come back to him gradually.

In Of Mice and Men (1937), George has a small monologue in which he states that a man can go into a whorehouse and get a beer and sex for a price agreed upon up front—unlike less professional relationships, you know what you are going to get and what you will have to pay for it.

The same theme of respect is expressed in Cannery Row in Steinbeck's descriptions of the Bear Flag: prostitution is a business that provides a service in demand, it is run cleanly and honestly, and it benefits the community.

The novel opens with the words: "Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream."

Steinbeck spent some of the happiest years of his life in a house in Pacific Grove near "Cannery Row" and the laboratory of his friend, Ed Ricketts.

After a traumatic time documenting the war in the Mediterranean campaign in 1943, Steinbeck returned home to find that his second marriage was also in difficulties.

Lee winds up owning a shack used to store fish meal when it is given to him by a debtor to settle a large outstanding grocery bill.

Mack negotiates with Lee Chong for the occupancy of a storage shack where he and the boys can live, which is fixed up and dubbed "The Palace Flophouse".

Hazel, a simple minded but good hearted-young man who was given a female name by a mother too tired from child-bearing to realize her error at first or subsequently to care, is the most prominent of Mack's boys.

The Palace Flop House boys also include Eddie, a part-time bartender at La Ida Cafe, and Hughie and Jones, who occasionally collected specimens of cats and frogs for Doc.

A gifted mechanic, Gay is arrested during the trip to catch frogs after he goes off to seek a Model T carburetor and disappears from the story, as he winds up back in jail.

He also figures in Tortilla Flat as Chin Kee, the owner of the squid packing business that employs the piasanos for one day, so they can raise money to pay for a party.

[7] Steinbeck later wrote a sequel released in 1954 called Sweet Thursday, in which several new characters are introduced and Doc finds love, with the help of his friends.

[8][9] Subsequently, it was revived by the Western Stage in 2005,[10] by the Community College of Allegheny County in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 2007,[8] and by the City Theatre of Sacramento, California in 2014.