Danny and Pilon share wine, two women, and a fight. Pilon kills a rooster, rents Danny's second house for money which it is understood he will never pay, and exchanges paper roses for a gallon of Señora Torelli's wine.ģ How the poison of possessions wrought with Pilon, and how evil temporarily triumphed in him. Danny fails to get the water turned on. After escaping, Danny talks his friend, a clever man named Pilon, into sharing his brandy and his houses.Ģ How Pilon was lured by greed of position to forsake Danny's hospitality. 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.

Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck