The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath

by John Steinbeck, Richard Poe (Read by), Charles Wollenberg (Editor)

Overview

Recently listed in the Top 100 List of the Century's Best American Journalism.

Gathered in this important volume are seven newspaper articles on migrant farm workers that John Steinbeck wrote for The San Francisco News in 1936, three years before The Grapes of Wrath. With the inquisitiveness of an investigative reporter and the emotional power of a novelist in his prime, Steinbeck toured the squatters' camps and Hoovervilles of California. Here he found once strong, independent farmers—the backbone of rural America—so reduced in dignity, beaten in spirit, sick, sullen, and defeated that they had been "cast down to a kind of subhumanity." He contrasts their misery with the hope offered by government resettlement camps, where self-help committees, child nurseries, quilting and sewing projects, and decent sanitation were restoring dignity and indeed saving lives.

The Harvest Gypsies gives us an eyewitness account of the horrendous Dust Bowl migration, a major event in California history, and provides the factual foundation for Steinbeck's masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath. Included are twenty-two photographs by Dorothea Lange and others, many of which accompanied Steinbeck's original articles.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781713584957
Publisher:	Brilliance Audio
Publication date:	12/29/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 6.75(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, CA, in 1902. Steinbeck realized that the migration caused by the Dust Bowl was drastically changing the labor forces of California from the foreign “cheap labor” to a higher standard of living for the farm workers. He felt for these migrant workers, and with the help of a friend, Tom Collins, unsuccessfully tried to get federal aid and sympathy, as shown in the articles of The Harvest Gypsies. Steinbeck continued in his crusade, publishing The Grapes of Wrath, for which he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.

Charles Wollenberg, former Chair of Social Sciences and Professor of History at Berkeley City College, is coeditor, with Marcia A. Eymann, of What's Going On? California and the Vietnam Era (University of California Press, 2004) and author of Marinship at War: Shipbuilding and Social Change in Wartime Sausalito (Western Heritage, 1990) and Berkeley: A City in History (University of California Press, 2008).

Date of Birth:

February 27, 1902

Date of Death:

December 20, 1968

Place of Birth:

Salinas, California

Place of Death:

New York, New York

Education:

Attended Stanford University intermittently between 1919 and 1925

Website:

http://www.steinbeck.org

Editorial Reviews

In 1936, a San Francisco newspaper commissioned Steinbeck to write a week-long series of articles about California's underclass of white migrant farm workers, who became the models and the inspiration for The Grapes of Wrath. Reprinted here, Steinbeck's observations of migrant families and of their exploitation by wealthy agriculturists have not lost their potency. And as Wollenberg, a history professor at Vista College, Berkeley, Calif., points out, the plight of the newly destitute and newly homeless has particular relevance today. Steinbeck's journalism shares the enduring quality of his famous novel (but critics of Steinbeck will beware; his heavy-handed style is only slightly less obtrusive here). Especially interesting are the final articles, which analyze the history of California's migrant populations and propose federal programs to alleviate their distress. Steinbeck's outrage leads to an emotional indictment of then-current farm management as ``a system of terrorism that would be unusual in the Fascist nations of the world.'' Certain to engage students of both American literature and labor history. Photos not seen by PW. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

"Written in the best tradition of advocacy journalism … Steinbeck moves among the migrants, pen in one hand, fruit pail in the other, alternately picking and penning his way to literary glory."—The Village Voice

"Contains some of Steinbeck's best journalism."—The Nation

"Steinbeck's potent blend of empathy and moral outrage was perfectly matched by the photographs of 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."—San Francisco Review of Books

"Steinbeck's journalism shares the enduring quality of his famous novel."—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher