Edward Flanders Robb Ricketts (May 14, 1897 – May 11, 1948) was an American marine biologist, ecologist, and philosopher. He is best known for Between Pacific Tides (1939), a pioneering study of intertidal ecology. He is also known as a mentor who influenced the writer John Steinbeck, which resulted in a collaboration and coauthorship of the book, Sea of Cortez (1941). Eleven years later, and just 3 years after the death of Ed Ricketts, John Steinbeck reprinted the narrative portion of their coauthored book with a new publisher, but removed Ed as coauthor, while adding a biography of Ed Ricketts, and Steinbeck made a new title for the book as The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1946). Steinbeck also added a eulogy for Ricketts, though it was met with public backlash. Life Ricketts was born in Chicago, Illinois, 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 of him that 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 ten years old. 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, but 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 Barbara Makar, daughter of Croatian immigrants- Marya Piskuric (married as Mary Makar) and Miho (Michael) Makar. As a private person, Anna often went by other names of "Nancy" and even "Barbara", and Ricketts was known to call her "Nan". Anna was born in Johnstown, PA in the beginning of 1900. Ricketts and Makar married in Chicago, Illinois, a year later they had a son, Edward F. Ricketts, Jr. and moved to California to set up Pacific Biological Laboratories with Albert