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in Working Days, but he rarely questioned the risks involved in bringing his whole sensibility to bear upon it. Steinbeck’s novel had a complicated growth process. The Grapes of Wrath was the product of his increasing immersion in the migrant material, which proved to be a Pandora’s box. It required an extended odyssey before he discovered the proper focus and style to do the topic justice. In one way or another, from August 1936, when Steinbeck discovered a subject “like nothing in the world,” through October 1939, when he resolved in Working Days to put behind him “that part of my life that made the Grapes,” the migrant issue, which had wounded him deeply, remained the central obsession for this obsessive writer. He produced a seven-part series of newspaper articles, “The Harvest Gypsies,” an unfinished novel, “The Oklahomans,” a completed but destroyed satire, “L’Affaire Lettuceberg,” and The Grapes of Wrath.

Each version shares a fixed core of elements: on one side, the entrenched power, wealth, authority, and consequent tyranny of California’s industrialized agricultural system (symbolized by Associated Farmers, Inc.), which produced flagrant violations of the migrants’ civil and human rights and ensured their continuing peonage, their loss of dignity, through threats, reprisals, and violence; on the other side, the powerlessness, poverty, victimization, and fear of the nomadic American migrants whose willingness to work, desire to retain their dignity, and enduring wish to settle land of their own were kept alive by their innate resilience and resourcefulness and the democratic benefits of government sanitary camps. From the moment he entered the fray, Steinbeck had no doubt that the presence of the migrants would change the fabric of California life, though he had little foresight about what his own role in that change would be. His concern was humanitarian: he wanted to be an effective advocate but did not wish to appear presumptuous. “Every effort I can bring to bear is and has been at the call of the common working people to the end that they may eat what they raise, use what they produce, and in every way and in completeness share in the works of their hands and heads,” he declared unequivocally to San Francisco News columnist John Barry in July 1938.

Not counting a scotched plan to edit and publish Collins’s reports, an abandoned play set in a squatters’ camp in Kern County, or a warm-up essay, “Dubious Battle in California” (in the September 12, 1936, issue of The Nation), Steinbeck’s first lengthy excursion into the migrants’ problems was published in the liberal, pro-labor San Francisco News. “The Harvest Gypsies” formed the foundation of Steinbeck’s concern for a long time to come, raised issues and initiated forces, gave him a working vocabulary with which to understand current events, and furthered his position as a reliable interpreter. This stage resulted from the notoriety caused by his recently published strike novel, In Dubious Battle (New York: Covici-Friede, 1936), after which Steinbeck found—often against his will—that he was fast being considered a sympathetic spokesman for the contemporary agricultural labor situation in a state that was primarily pro-management. This was a profound irony, because while In Dubious Battle exposed the capitalist dynamics of corporate farming, it took no side for or against labor, preferring instead to see the fruit strike as a symbol of “man’s eternal, bitter warfare with himself.”

At George West’s invitation, Steinbeck produced “The Harvest Gypsies. ” These articles, peppered with Dorothea Lange’s graphic photographs of migrants, appeared from October 5 to 12, 1936. Steinbeck’s gritty reports detailed the plan of California’s feudal agricultural labor industry. The pieces introduced the antagonists, underscored the anachronistic rift between the Okie agrarian past and the mechanized California present, explained the economic background and insidious effects of the labor issue, examined the deplorable migrant living conditions, and exposed the unconscionable