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Appendix A
“The Grapes of Wrath” by Peter Lisca
Steinbeck’s trek from Oklahoma to the cotton fields of California in the fall of 1937 was not the first of such forays
made to observe his materials at first hand. He had made several trips into the agricultural areas of California in
preparation for his strike novel, and immediately after completing Of Mice and Men in September of 1936 he had gone
to observe the squatters’ camps near Salinas and Bakersfield. There he gathered materials for “Dubious Battle in
California” (Nation, Sept. 12, 1936) and a series of seven other articles called “The Harvest Gypsies,” which appeared in
the San Francisco News, October 5–12, 1936. 1 On his return from this trip he wrote to Ben Abramson, “California is
not very far from civil war. I hope it can be averted.” (JS-BA, 10/?/36) He expressed the same concern to his agents: “I
just returned yesterday from the strike area of Salinas and from my migrants in Bakersfield. This thing is dangerous.
Maybe it will be patched up for a while, but I look for the lid to blow off in a few weeks. Issues are very sharp here
now.… My material drawer is chock full.” (Steinbeck to Mclntosh and Otis [hereafter mo], 10/7/36)
During one period that autumn Steinbeck lived in one of the federal migrant camps in central California and wrote to
Lawrence Clark Powell, “I have to write this sitting in a ditch. I’m out working – may go south to pick a little cotton.
Migrants are going south now and I’ll probably go along.” 2 After the publication of The Grapes of Wrath these migrants
sent Steinbeck a patchwork dog sewn from pieces of shirttails and dresses and bearing around its neck a tag with the
inscription “Migrant John.”
The San Francisco News articles are straight-forward reports of living conditions among migrant workers, along with
suggestions and appeals for a more enlightened treatment of these people. Although they contain several details which
were later incorporated in The Grapes of Wrath, these articles are significant primarily as a record of Steinbeck’s attitude
toward the people and conditions which he was to use as the materials of his great novel. Actually, the extremes of
poverty, injustice, and suffering depicted in these articles are nowhere equaled in The Grapes of Wrath.
Steinbeck was still trying to understand the total situation. He did not go into the field to substantiate a ready-made
theory. When the editors of Occident asked him for an article of a political nature, he refused, saying, “Generalities seem
to solidify so quickly into stupidities. A writer can only honestly say – ‘This is the way it seems to me at this moment.’
“He didn’t think he knew enough about the situation and didn’t wish to retire into some “terminology.” Steinbeck did,
however, allow the editors to print his letter of refusal, part of which follows:
The changes go on so rapidly and it is so hard to see! Sad that it will be so easy in fifty years. Of course there is a larger picture
one can feel. I suppose the appellations communist and fascist are adequate. I don’t really think they are. I’m probably making
a mistake in simply listening to men talk and watching them act, hoping that the projection of the microcosm will define the outlines
of the macrocosm. There will come a time and that soon, I suppose, when such a position will be when we’ll all put on blinders
and put our heads down, and yelling some meaningless rallying cry, we’ll do what men of every other time have done – tear
the guts out of our own race. 3
Unlike Doc in In Dubious Battle, however. Steinbeck’s attempt to understand did not make him a dispassionate observer.
In the autumn of that same year he was planning to accept a Hollywood contract of a thousand dollars a week for six
weeks’ work on Of Mice and Men so that he could give two dollars apiece to three thousand migrants. Pascal Covici flew
out to the coast to talk him out of it. Early in 1938, in the midst of work on the new novel, he wrote his agents, “I must
go over into the interior valleys. There are five thousand families starving to death over there, not just hungry, but
actually starving.… In one tent there are twenty people quarantined for smallpox and two of the women are to have
babies in that tent this week…. Talk about Spanish children. The death of children by starvation in our valleys is simply
staggering.… I’ll do what I can…. Funny how mean and how little books become in the face of such tragedies.” 4 When
Life offered to send him into the field with a photographer to write about the migrants, he informed his agents that he
would accept no money other than expenses – “I’m sorry but I simply can’t make money on these people…. The
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