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The Harvest Gypsies
On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck
Introduction by Charles Wollenberg
80 pages, (6 x 8), with b&w photos
Trade paper, ISBN:1-890771-61-0, $9.95

Published in Collaboration with the California Council for the Humanities

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.

Reviews:

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

"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

"The essays in this little treatise are brilliant, but it is the juxtaposition of Steinbeck’s journalism with the short photo essay that brings this volume home. The unquestionable photographic genius of Dorothea Lange perfectly complements Steinbeck’s impassioned prose…. And as Charles Wollenberg notes in his fine introduction, we can not, and ought not, fail to be moved by these timeless reminders of the harsh inequalities in American life."—The Californians

"It contains some of Steinbeck’s best journalism…. We don’t forget the sights the stark modesty of his prose conveys."—The Nation

"The series is a vivid account of Steinbeck’s first wrenching experience with the harvest gypsies…[now in] an attractive new edition…. Charles Wollenberg, an historian, has written a lucid summary of Steinbeck’s involvement in the project…. It is a fine volume."—The Steinbeck Newsletter, San Jose State University

"Written in the best tradition of advocacy journalism, the articles are sober reports from California’s interior valleys…. There is a grittiness to them that’s missing from Steinbeck’s later fiction. The Joad family seems like the Brady Bunch down on their luck compared to some of the people described here…. In the imagination, Steinbeck moves among the migrants, pen in one hand, fruit pail in the other, alternately picking and penning his way to literary glory…. He goes into the field and lives his story, sharing in the suffering and injustice…."—The Village Voice

"If you want an example [of journalism, of passion and conviction, a more honest approach]…pick up The Harvest of Gypsies."—The Sacramento Union

"Perhaps no one has depicted the human suffering, the deprivation, the degradation of the migrant workers in the 1930s as well as did John Steinbeck…. He revealed the poverty, brutalization, homelessness and helplessness of these workers in the articles…."—KPFA Folio

"[On the]anniversary of the publication of Steinbeck’s greatest novel [The Grapes of Wrath], these newspaper pieces are the forerunner of that literary achievement."—Southern California Quarterly

"[Steinbeck’s] potent blend of empathy and moral outrage…[in] these essays serve once again as a kind of advance notice for the famous novel…."—The Sun

"I read the report by Steinbeck on the Dust Bowl disaster[and] the refugee camps in Northern California in the 30s with great interest and pleasure."—Sandrine Palussiere

"Those emotion-laden pieces, which later provided the factual foundation for The Grapes of Wrath, are collected in this slender volume."—American West

Author Biographies:

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, unsucessfully 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. Steinbeck died in 1968 in New York City.

Charles Wollenberg is a noted historian and author of Marinship at War: Shipbuilding and Social Change in Wartime Sausalito and Golden Gate Metropolis: Perspectives in Bay Area History.