Cannery Row
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40 free Cannery Row trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
John Steinbeck's Cannery Row is a short, funny, tender novel about a waterfront street in Monterey, California, and the people who drift along it: a kind-hearted scientist everyone calls Doc, Mack and his band of cheerful idlers, the shopkeeper Lee Chong and the madam Dora Flood. Almost nothing happens except two parties, and readers have loved it since 1945. This quiz follows the book the way readers remember it: the schemes to thank Doc, the collecting trips, the odd little chapters about neighbours and animals, and the presents that go wrong. It also covers the real people and places Steinbeck drew on, the sequel, and the 1982 film. The questions run from easy to tough, so they suit book clubs, students revising the novel and anyone planning a visit to the Monterey waterfront.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which star was dropped from the 1982 film Cannery Row days into shooting, then won millions from MGM in court?
Raquel Welch
Raquel Welch sued MGM for breach of contract and was awarded a reported $10.8 million in 1986. Debra Winger, 15 years her junior, took over as Suzy.
Q 02What odd concoction does Doc order at a diner on his drive south in Cannery Row, just to taste it?
A beer milkshake
A beer milkshake haunts Doc after a friend jokes that he would order one, so he finally does. He tells the startled waitress it is doctor's orders.
Q 03Which famous attraction opened in 1984 on the site of the Hovden plant, the last working cannery on Cannery Row?
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Monterey Bay Aquarium was the first anywhere to show a living kelp forest. It revived the old street and now brings the county hundreds of millions of dollars.
Q 04Which real friend of John Steinbeck, who ran a specimen lab in Monterey, was the inspiration for Doc in Cannery Row?
Ed Ricketts
Ed Ricketts became a celebrity when the book came out, with tourists and reporters seeking him out. His 1939 seashore guide is still a classic of ecology.
Q 05Which fish were the canneries of John Steinbeck's Cannery Row built to pack, before the catch collapsed in the 1940s?
Sardines
Sardines made Monterey the country's leading fishing port. Then the catch crashed by four-fifths in a single year, 1946 to 1947, and the plants shut one by one.
Q 06Which animals do Mack and the boys catch by the hundred in Cannery Row to pay for a party for Doc?
Frogs
Frogs fetch a nickel apiece from Doc, who needs about three hundred. The boys spend the lot at Lee Chong's before the party, and every one escapes that night.
Q 07Which John Steinbeck epic about the Joad family did some critics hold up against the lighter Cannery Row?
The Grapes of Wrath
The Grapes of Wrath had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940, and some reviewers felt the comic tale of Mack and the boys did not match its importance.
Q 08Which actor played Doc in the 1982 film Cannery Row, opposite Debra Winger as Suzy DeSoto?
Nick Nolte
Nick Nolte starred as Doc in a film stitched together from two Steinbeck novels. It was shot on two giant sound stages joined into a single set.
Q 09Which 1954 sequel to Cannery Row brings Doc home from the army to find his laboratory failing?
Sweet Thursday
Sweet Thursday was written with Broadway in mind, after John Steinbeck heard that producers wanted a musical set on the Row. In it Doc finally finds love.
Q 10Which famous early automobile, a truck owned by Lee Chong, does Gay coax back to life in Cannery Row?
A Ford Model T
A Ford Model T carries the boys on their collecting trip until it breaks down. Gay hitches a ride to find a spare part and lands in jail instead.
Q 11Which farming town was the birthplace of Cannery Row author John Steinbeck, whose father was Monterey County treasurer?
Salinas
Salinas is where he finished high school before leaving Stanford without a degree. His boyhood home there, a turreted Victorian, has been restored.
Q 12Which John Steinbeck novel about Monterey's wine-loving paisanos was his first hit, a decade before Cannery Row?
Tortilla Flat
Tortilla Flat follows a band of friends on the hill above the town who live for wine and company. Steinbeck came back to Monterey's idlers ten years later.
Q 13What kind of shop does Lee Chong keep in Cannery Row, a cramped single room that sells almost anything on credit?
A grocery
Q 21What was the official name of Monterey's Cannery Row before the city renamed it in honour of John Steinbeck's novel?
Ocean View Avenue
Ocean View Avenue was already nicknamed Cannery Row by 1918, when wartime demand packed it with fish plants. The city only made the nickname official after the novel made it famous.
Q 22What name do Mack and the boys give the pointer puppy they bring home from the Captain's place in Cannery Row?
Darling
Darling is spoiled by every man in the house, and her brush with distemper shakes the boys out of their gloom. Nola is the name of her mother.
Q 23What do Dora's girls sew from their own silk dresses and underclothes as a present for Doc in Cannery Row?
A patchwork quilt
A grocery, small and crowded, supplies everything the Row needs, and Lee Chong alone guards the whiskey shelf. He was based on a real Chinese-born shopkeeper, Won Yee.
Q 14What grand name do Mack and the boys give the old fish-meal warehouse they rent from Lee Chong in Cannery Row?
The Palace Flophouse
The Palace Flophouse, in full the Palace Flophouse and Grill, is let to the boys for a rent that Lee Chong never collects. Mack chalks out each man's sleeping space.
Q 15What has Henri the painter spent years building in Cannery Row while secretly hoping never to finish it?
A boat
A boat on blocks is Henri's home, and finishing it would mean putting out on the water, which frightens him. Two wives leave him because it is too cramped.
Q 16Which marine animals is Doc collecting on a Southern California reef in Cannery Row when he finds a drowned girl?
Octopuses
Octopuses, small ones that cling to the boulders at La Jolla, are worth a 500-mile drive to Doc. The dead girl's face stays with him long afterwards.
Q 17Which veteran Hollywood director, then in his seventies, narrates the 1982 film Cannery Row?
John Huston
John Huston, director of The Maltese Falcon and The African Queen, speaks the narration that links the film's vignettes about life on the Row.
Q 18Which of Mack's boys in Cannery Row helps Doc gather starfish in the tide pools while asking endless questions?
Hazel
Hazel got a girl's name because his worn-out mother did not notice her eighth child was a boy. He asks questions for the sound of talk, not for the answers.
Q 19What does John Steinbeck call Doc's laboratory in Cannery Row, a thin disguise for a real Monterey supply house?
Western Biological
Western Biological stands in for Pacific Biological Laboratories, which sold preserved animals to schools and museums. Steinbeck himself owned half of it.
Q 20What respectable-sounding name does Dora Flood give the brothel she runs in John Steinbeck's Cannery Row?
The Bear Flag Restaurant
The Bear Flag Restaurant is run so decently that Dora Flood is among the biggest givers to charity in town. She was based on Flora Woods, a real Monterey madam.
A patchwork quilt is their gift, and Doc puts it on his bed the moment they hand it over. The women had long wondered why he never came calling on them.
Q 24What does young Frankie steal from a jeweller's window in Cannery Row as a party present for Doc?
An onyx clock
An onyx clock topped with a bronze St George catches his eye because the saint looks a little like Doc. Frankie is caught, and Doc cannot save him from an institution.
Q 25What do Sam Malloy and his wife turn into a home on the vacant lot in John Steinbeck's Cannery Row?
A cast-off boiler
A cast-off boiler from a cannery keeps the Malloys snug and dry, and Sam lets out parts of it to men who need a bed. His wife wants curtains, though it has no windows.
Q 26Why does Doc's second Cannery Row party fall on a day that is not his birthday?
He gave Mack a false date
He gave Mack a false date, October 27, because he suspected a scheme when Mack began asking about astrology. By then he had forgotten ever saying it.
Q 27Which animal gets a chapter to itself near the end of Cannery Row, digging a perfect home but finding no mate?
A gopher
A gopher builds the ideal hole in the weeds of the Row and waits for a mate who never comes. In the end he has to move somewhere with more females and more traps.
Q 28Where was John Steinbeck living when he wrote Cannery Row in 1944, far from the California street it describes?
New York
New York was home when he wrote it, not long after his months overseas as a war correspondent. He finished the book in under two months.
Q 29What wrecked the lab that inspired Doc's in Cannery Row in 1936, leading John Steinbeck to buy half the business?
A fire next door
A fire next door at the Del Mar Cannery spread and destroyed most of the lab's contents. The owner's seashore manuscript survived only because it was already with the publisher.
Q 30How did the friend who inspired Doc in Cannery Row meet his death in 1948, just uphill from his laboratory?
A train hit his car
A train hit his car at a rail crossing as he drove to dinner, and he died three days later. It was a week before a planned expedition with Steinbeck.