Edward Flanders Robb Ricketts (May 14, 1897 – May 11, 1948) was an American marine biologist, ecologist, and philosopher. Renowned as the inspiration for the character Doc in John Steinbeck's 1945 novel Cannery Row, Rickett's professional reputation is rooted in Between Pacific Tides (1939), a pioneering study of intertidal ecology. A friend and mentor of Steinbeck, they collaborated on and co-authored the book, Sea of Cortez (1941).
Eleven years later, and just three years after the death of Ed Ricketts, John Steinbeck reprinted the narrative portion of their coauthored book with a new publisher, with Steinbeck removing Ricketts as coauthor, adding a biography of Ed Ricketts and re-titling the book The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1946). Steinbeck also added a eulogy for Ricketts, but it was met with public backlash.
Gwyn Conger Steinbeck, the writer's second wife, thought highly of Ricketts. She said, "There was such a special magic about Ed Ricketts, and, in many ways he was John's offspring; he was the source of the Steinbeck Nile.
Ricketts was born in Chicago to Abbott Ricketts and Alice Beverly Flanders Ricketts. He had a younger sister Frances and a younger brother Thayer. His sister Frances (Ricketts) Strong said he had a mind like a dictionary and was often in trouble for correcting teachers and other adults. Ricketts spent most of his childhood in Chicago, except for a year in South Dakota when he was age 10.
After a year of college, Ricketts traveled to Texas and New Mexico. In 1917, he was drafted into the Army Medical Corps. He hated the military bureaucracy, but according to John Steinbeck, "was a successful soldier".
After discharge from the army, Ricketts studied zoology at the University of Chicago. He was influenced by his professor W.C. Allee, a biologist and ecological theorist, who would go on to write a classic early textbook on ecology. Ricketts became a proponent of ecological thinking, in which man was only one part of a great chain of being, caught in a web of life too large for him to control or understand. However, he dropped out without taking a degree. He then spent several months walking through the American South, from Indiana to Florida. He used material from this trip to publish an article in Travel magazine titled "Vagabonding Through Dixie". He returned to Chicago and studied some more at the university.
In 1922, Ricketts met and married Anna "Nan" Barbara Makar, who was born to Croatian immigrants in 1900. In 1923, the couple had a son, Edward F. Ricketts, Jr. and moved to California to set up Pacific Biological Laboratories with Albert E. Galigher, a college friend of Ricketts' with whom he had run a similar business on a smaller scale. In 1924, Ricketts became sole owner of the lab, and soon two daughters were born: Nancy Jane on November 28, 1924, and Cornelia on April 6, 1928.
Between 1925 and 1927, Ricketts' sister Frances and both his parents moved to California; Frances and their father Abbott worked with Ricketts at the lab. In late 1930 Ricketts met aspiring writer John Steinbeck and his wife Carol, who had moved to Pacific Grove earlier in the year. For more than a year, Carol worked half-time for Ricketts at the lab until 1932 when Ricketts' wife Nan left, taking their two daughters, and Ricketts no longer had enough money to pay Carol's salary. Steinbeck also spent time at the lab, learning marine biology, helping Ricketts preserve specimens and talking about philosophy.
In 1936, Ricketts and Nan separated for good, and he lived in his lab. On November 25, 1936, a fire spread from the adjacent cannery and destroyed the lab. Ricketts lost nearly everything, including an extraordinary amount of correspondence, research notes, manuscripts, and his prized library, which had held everything from invaluable scientific resources to his beloved collection of poetry. However, the manuscript of Ricketts' textbook (with Jack Calvin) Between Pacific Tides had already been sent to the publisher. John Steinbeck became a silent 50% partner in the lab after he funded its reconstruction costs.
In 1940, Ricketts and Steinbeck journeyed to the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California) in a chartered fishing boat to collect invertebrates for the scientific catalog in their book, Sea of Cortez. Also in 1940, Ricketts began a relationship with Eleanor Susan Brownell Anthony "Toni" Solomons Jackson, who became his common-law wife. As Steinbeck's secretary, Jackson helped edit The Log from the Sea of Cortez. Jackson, who had attended the University of California, Los Angeles, was the daughter of Katherine Gray Church and Theodore Solomons, an explorer and early member of the Sierra Club, who had discovered and defined the John Muir Trail. Jackson and her young daughter Katherine Adele moved in with Ricketts and lived with him until 1947. In addition to Steinbeck, their circle of friends included the novelist and painter Henry Miller and the mythologist, writer, and lecturer Joseph Campbell.
During World War II, Ricketts again served in the Army, this time as a medical lab technician; he was drafted in October 1942, missing the age cut-off by days. During his service, he kept collecting marine life and compiling data. His son was drafted in 1943.
In 1945, Steinbeck's novel Cannery Row was published, making Ricketts, the model for "Doc", a celebrity, and tourists and journalists began seeking him out. "Doc" is an intellectual who was somewhat outcast from intellectual circles, a party-loving drinking man, in close touch with the working class, prostitutes, and bums of Monterey's Cannery Row. Steinbeck wrote that "[Doc] wears a beard and his face is half Christ and half satyr and his face tells the truth."
Ricketts himself read Cannery Row with exasperation, but ended saying simply that it could not be criticized because it had not been written with malice. Ricketts also inspired "Doc" in Sweet Thursday, the sequel to Cannery Row; "Friend Ed" in Burning Bright; "Doc Burton" in In Dubious Battle; Jim Casy in The Grapes of Wrath; and "Doctor Winter" in The Moon Is Down.
In September 1946, Ricketts' daughter Nancy Jane had a son, making Ricketts a grandfather. That same year, the health of his stepdaughter Kay deteriorated due to a brain tumor; she died the following year on October 5, 1947. Kay's mother, Toni left Ricketts shortly after this death. Just a few weeks later, Ricketts met Alice Campbell, a music and philosophy student half his age. They "married" in early 1948, but the marriage was not valid because Ricketts never had a legal divorce from Nan.
In March 1948 in New York City, Toni Jackson married Dr Benjamin Elazari Volcani, a renowned microbiologist she had met while he was working with the famous microbiologist C. B. van Niel (a student of Albert Kluyver's) at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station in Monterey in 1943.
In 1948, Ricketts and Steinbeck planned together to go to British Columbia and write the book The Outer Shores about the marine life north toward Alaska. On previous trips Ricketts had done most of the needed research and he gave Steinbeck the typescripts for these as he had done previously with The Sea of Cortez.
A week before the planned expedition, on May 8, 1948, as Ricketts was driving across the railroad tracks at Drake Avenue, just uphill from Cannery Row, on his way to dinner after his day's work, a Del Monte Express passenger train hit his car. He lived for three days, conscious at least some of the time, before dying on May 11.
A life-size bust of Ricketts has been erected at the site of the long-defunct rail crossing to serve as a commemoration. Passers-by often pick nearby flowers and place them in the statue's hand. Also at the crossing are derelict crossbucks marking the site of the accident.