he opening lines, Steinbeck plays up his setting, the Salinas Valley in Monterey Country, California. The reader is introduced to the "high grey-flannel fog of winter" in the Valley that "closed [it] offà from all the rest of the world" (Steinbeck 419). Steinbeck further increases the isolated feeling of his locale as he describes that the fog "On every side à sat like a lid on the mountains and made of the great valley a closed pot" (Steibeck 419). The Salinas Valley is thus made to seem almost
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