The entire matter illuminates the failure of a greatly talented writer to develop into a major novelist-a failure that has puzzled many Steinbeck readers. All of this appears to have had grave consequences in a good deal of Steinbeck's later work. Apparently he felt that he had structured the novel rigidly that this was a good way to achieve structure that only the stupidity of a mass audience obscured the issue. Moreover, the somewhat ugly commercial success of "Tortilla Flat" turned Steinbeck against the novel as it really is. In short, there is very little of "Morte d'Arthur in Tortilla Flat". They were drunkards, thieves, ruffians, and vagabonds, but they were also surprisingly good at heart requiring little more from life than friendship and a little wine. For, in fact, the novel is loose and episodic, and a sophisticated comic irony is used to locate socioeconomic and Catholic values in a colorful "paisano" community. In the town of Tortilla Flat above beautiful Monterey lived a group of men called the paisanos. His continued insistence that a parallel to Malory's "Morte d'Arthur" does control the novel, and his reliance in later work on predetermined, external, and arbitrary ordering devices, make it sadly apparent that he did not learn much about structural harmony from "Tortilla Flat". The novel's promise was dimmed by Steinbeck's evident inability to understand his real success. "Tortilla Flat" (1935) was John Steinbeck's first artistic and commercial success.
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