The Harvest Gypsies - by John Steinbeck (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Selected by NYU as one of the century's best books of American journalism.

Gathered in this volume are seven long-form articles that John Steinbeck wrote in 1936 for The San Francisco News about the plight of migrant farmworkers during the Dust Bowl, accompanied by photographs by Dorothea Lange and others. Steinbeck toured the squatters' camps and Hoovervilles of California, creating unforgettable portraits of once strong, independent farmers reduced to misery. The inquisitiveness and outrage of an investigative reporter combined with the expressive powers of a novelist in his prime fueled The Harvest Gypsies, which in turn furnished the factual and emotional roots for The Grapes of Wrath and has long been hailed as an American classic in its own right.

Review Quotes

"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

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).