Ann Malaspina - John Steinbeck

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John Steinbeck took to the road in an old bakery truck in the summer of 1936. The San Francisco News had hired the 34-year-old writer to report on the migrant laborers in the agricultural fields that spread like carpets across the valleys of California. The migrants were refugees of the Dust Bowl disaster in the Great Plains, brought on by extreme drought and made worse by the economic Depression. After losing their homes and farms, they drove to California with hopes of starting their lives over in a land of plenty. Now they were traveling up and down the state, following the harvests of grapes, peaches, lettuce, and other crops.

Steinbeck was already a promising novelist with an interest in labor issues. His first successful novel, Tortilla Flat, was published a year earlier in 1935. The comic novel is about a group of unemployed veterans who don't want to work in the fish canning factories in Monterey, the only jobs available to them, and would rather talk and drink together. Another novel, In Dubious Battle, followed in 1936. The story about a migrant apple workers' strike during the Great Depression shows Steinbeck's empathy for laborers who stand up to their bosses, the banks, police, and society in order to get fair wages. Because Steinbeck could mix a good story and compelling characters with dynamic social issues, the novels were popular with readers. No wonder the newspaper hired Steinbeck to write about the Dust Bowl refugees. He wasn't afraid to raise controversy or challenge his readers with uncomfortable truths.

Steinbeck stopped at government camps and roadsides where migrant workers and their families had set up makeshift homes. He was shocked to discover the harsh reality of their plight. The Dust Bowl refugees arrived in California "bewildered and beaten and usually in a state of semi-starvation," he wrote in one article, later collected in The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to The Grapes of Wrath. Hired as cheap labor, they worked long, back-breaking hours for little pay. They did not plant new roots, but instead were forced into a desperate vagabond existence. "On side roads and near rivers...the squalid, filthy squatters' camp will have been set up, and the orchards will be filled with pickers and cutters and driers," he wrote. When an orchard or field was picked clean, the migrants rolled up their blankets, threw dirt on the cooking fires, and moved on to the next harvest.

Outskirts of Salinas, California: a rapidly growing settlement of lettuce workers. Here, a migrant family from Oklahoma settling in a makeshift dwelling. April 1939, photo by Dorothea Lange.

Source: Library of Congress. Prints and Photographs Division.

As a working journalist, Steinbeck took notes. He saw a three-year-old boy with a stomach distended from malnutrition and mothers too weak to clean the family's clothes. He took down what people had to eat. "Family of sevenBeans, fried dough. Family of sixFried cornmeal. Family of fiveOatmeal mush." He interviewed mothers who'd lost their babies because there was no milk. He talked to families who relied on their children to work in the fields, because the parents were sick and malnourished.

To make matters worse, the migrant workers faced discrimination from the locals. "The migrants are needed, and they are hated," Steinbeck writes. One boy in a squatters camp told Steinbeck, "When they need us they call us migrants, and when we've picked their crops, we're bums and we got to get out." Unlike traditional immigrant farm workers, the American-born laborers were more aware of their rights, which turned their bosses against them. As Steinbeck observed, "It should be understood that... the old methods of repression, of starvation wages, of jailing, beating and intimidation are not going to work; these are American people."

It wasn't the first time Steinbeck lived among farm laborers. Growing up in Salinas Valley, he was surrounded by large-scale agricultural fields where immigrant workers toiled from dawn until dusk. During high school and college, Steinbeck sometimes found work in the fields alongside them. Yet Steinbeck's family lived in a large house with a white picket fence, and he would never experience the futile hopes and persistent poverty of the fulltime workers. The best he could do was to write about their lives and be an advocate for their struggles.

Thousands of migrant workers are employed for harvesting the potato crop of Kern County, California. June 1938, photo by Dorothea Lange.

Source: Library of Congress. Prints and Photographs Division.

One of the great writers of the twentieth century, Steinbeck was a complicated person, and not easily labeled. He was never a radical or a communist, but had great empathy with laborers, migrants, and others who lived on society's margins. Aware of the deep social inequalities in American society, he disapproved of the divide between the haves and the have-nots. Still, he was not starry-eyed or naive. In his fiction, Steinbeck did not paint all poor workers as goodand all rich bosses as bad. Still, social inequity and the imbalance of wealth and power was a persistent theme in Steinbeck's greatest works. His characters were not just individuals, but part of larger groups caught by the movements of history, the economy, and even weather such as drought and floods.

In a career spanning many decades, Steinbeck constantly explored new subjects, experimented with form, and tried new genres. He wrote screenplays, scripts for the theater, nonfiction, and thousands of letters to friends and acquaintances. Many of his stories came from his own experience and interests. He wrote about war, marine biology, jazz, politics, myths, and his own family. He wrote short stories, long and short novels, plays, screenplays, nonfiction, journals, and thousands of lettersto presidents, first ladies, and old friends. Steinbeck published around 30 books of fiction and nonfiction. At least 14 of his novels and stories became films.

Whatever his subject or genre, Steinbeck focused on the human condition. He looked for what made people vulnerable and humanand, in doing so, still captivates his readers to this day. "And, of course, people are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen. And here I make a rulea story is about everyone or it will not last," says Lee, one of the characters in his epic novel East of Eden about two California families whose lives intersect, at times tragically. Lee is the wise Chinese-American servant who helps both families understand themselves.

Not all his novels were successes, and his reputation was mixed among literary critics. Some thought he did not deserve major literary prizes. But his popularity was strong among readers. His best novels are still being boughtand taught in classroomsmore than a half-century after his death in 1968. In his stories set in the early decades of the twentieth century, readers in the next century recognize their own world, with the same problems of inequality, human frailty, and elusive dreams.