Tortilla Flat

After returning from the First World War, Danny discovers that he has inherited two small houses in Monterey. Pilon, Pablo, Jesus Maria, Big Joe Portagee and the Pirate gradually gather around him, forming a loose household whose members drink, steal, bargain and repeatedly find comic reasons to redefine ownership and obligation.

Steinbeck structures their adventures as an ironic echo of Arthurian fellowship while grounding them in the marginalised paisano community of postwar California. The novel’s humour is inseparable from poverty and exclusion, but it also presents generosity, friendship and shared stories as forms of wealth that resist conventional ideas of property and respectability.