Now considered to be one of the most significant American writers of the 20th century, John Steinbeck was born and grew up in California, which would serve as the setting for much of his fiction: The Pearl is set in Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula. Steinbeck’s experience as a laborer and journalist throughout the 1920s led him to feature sympathetic, working-class protagonists in much of his fiction. He is best known today for his 1939 novel, The Grapes of Wrath, which follows the struggles of Oklahoma tenant farmers who travel to California in search of work after losing their farms to bank foreclosures during the Great Depression; the novel won the National Book Award as well as a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. At the same time, Steinbeck also received intense criticism for his then-radical views on labor. Like The Grapes of Wrath, The Pearl examines the personal cost of exploitative economic policies, although within a different historical context.

Steinbeck demonstrated a lifelong interest in marine biology, which was his intended area of study at Stanford University, though he never completed his degree. In 1940, he took a six-week trip along the Gulf of California, collecting specimens with his friend Ed Ricketts, himself a marine biologist.