Essay Review

Essay Review Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath. By John Steinbeck, edited by Robert DeMott. (New York: Viking Press, 1989. 226 pages, $18.95.) The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to The Grapes of Wrath. By John Stein­ beck, with an introduction by Charles Wollenberg. (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1988. 62 pages, $7.95.) John Steinbeck’s epic novel, The Grapes of Wrath, is about an American legend. The Joads of Oklahoma came to represent the great multitude of displaced families forced to leave farms and lives behind in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and trek west toward what they hoped would be better times. The book, helped along by the John Ford film, isa legend too, a classic ofAmerican fiction. Meanwhile, among Steinbeck buffs, how he wrote his masterpiece has become another kind of legend, a story all its own. You might say that all three legends are being commemorated this year as Viking Press releases its 50th Anniversary edition of the novel. Among the several new books clustering around the birthday celebration, two flesh out the key moments in this most fertile period of the writer’s career. Though his life and times have been much written about in recent years, these two books make available to a wider readership materials by Steinbeck himself that have until now been seen mainly by specialists. Two years before he started the Joads on their archetypal journey, Stein­ beck took an assignment from The San Francisco News to do a series of articles on the predicament of the state’s migrant farm workers. It was the summer of 1936, and refugees from the South and the Midwest were pouring into Cali­ fornia by the thousands. At the time Steinbeck and his wife Carol were living near Los Gatos, California. His firstmajor book on the subject offarm labor, In DubiousBattle, had just been published and well received. Certain growers were troubled by his pro-worker point of view, and certain labor radicals did not appreciate his behind-the-scenes account of their Machiavellian organizing strategies. But News editor George West, who had met Steinbeck in Carmel a few years earlier, liked what he had read. He arranged to send the 34-year-old novelist on a state-wide tour of the fields and Hoovervilles and the new camps being developed by the federal Resettlement Administration. The result of this trip was called “The Harvest Gypsies,” seven pieces that appeared in the News between October 5 and 12, 1936. They were reprinted in 1938 by San Francisco’s labor-oriented Simon J. Lubin Society in a pamph­ let titled TheirBlood isStrong. His potent blend ofempathy and moral outrage 154 Western American Literature was perfectly matched by the photographs by Dorothea Lange, who had caught the whole saga with her camera: the tents, the jalopies, the bindlestiffs, the pathos and courage of uprooted mothers and children. Their Blood is Strong has long been regarded as a treasured but hard-tofind prologue to The Grapes of Wrath. Thanks to Heyday Books in Berkeley, these early articles, together with 16 pages of photos by Lange and others, are now available in a new softcover edition that revives the original title. Cali­ fornia historian Charles Wollenberg has set the scene with an excellent intro­ duction. Reprinted in the fall of 1988, half a century after the Lubin Society pamphlet appeared, these essays serve once again as a kind of advance notice for the famous novel. While researching that series Steinbeck met Tom Collins, the manager of a government resettlement camp south of Bakersfield, in Kern County. Drawn to each other, the two men were soon travelling companions, as Collins became his migrant-labor mentor, providing raw material—field reports and oral recollections—that would find its way into “The Harvest Gypsies” as well as into the novel. (His camp would become the model for “Weedpatch Camp,” in The Grapes of Wrath, and Collins himself would be mentioned on the dedi­ cation page as “Tom, Who Lived It.”) In early 1938 the two men were travelling again through the San Joaquin Valley, this time into fields near Visalia and Nipomo, where winter floods had created...