The Witness
Who Made
Congress Blink

John Ernst Steinbeck was born in 1902 in Salinas, California, a market town at the head of the Salinas Valley — one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world, and one of the most brutal toward the people who worked it. His father managed the county flour mill; his mother had been a schoolteacher. They were comfortable, educated, and firmly middle-class in a county where the distance between the comfortable middle class and the workers in the fields was wide and rarely crossed. Steinbeck crossed it constantly, as a child, as a young man doing agricultural labor to fund his studies at Stanford, and eventually as a writer who believed that the novelist's primary obligation was to the truth of other people's lives.

He left Stanford without graduating in 1925, went to New York, failed to establish himself, came back to California, and spent the late 1920s and early 1930s writing novels that almost no one read. He lived frugally — for a period, he and his first wife Carol survived partly on fish he caught in the bay at Pacific Grove and vegetables from a garden they grew themselves. This was not romantic poverty; it was the real thing, and it gave him a practical understanding of subsistence that his later books would draw on with a precision that reviewers who had never been hungry sometimes missed.

The Education of a Witness

By the mid-1930s Steinbeck had published Tortilla Flat (1935) and In Dubious Battle (1936) to reasonable notice. The first was a comic novel about paisanos in Monterey; the second was a grimly realistic account of a California agricultural strike, researched through conversations with union organizers and workers that had given him his first sustained exposure to the political economy of California farming. Both books demonstrated a gift for vernacular dialogue and a refusal to condescend to working-class characters that distinguished him immediately from most American writers of his class and education.

Then the Dust Bowl migration began. Starting in 1935 and accelerating through 1936 and 1937, tens of thousands of families from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and the surrounding states — displaced by drought, mechanization, and bank foreclosures — loaded what they owned onto flatbed trucks and drove west on Route 66 toward California, where they had been told there was work. There was work; there was also a system of labor exploitation so comprehensive and so brutal that it shocked even Californians who had thought they knew how their agricultural economy operated.

Steinbeck went to see it. He drove into the San Joaquin Valley, visited the federal labor camps that the Farm Security Administration had set up for migrant workers, and spent time — days, then weeks — talking to the families who lived there. He traveled with Tom Collins, the camp manager who would become the model for the government agent in The Grapes of Wrath, and whose meticulous records of camp life gave Steinbeck a documentary foundation for the novel's specific details. He wrote a series of articles for the San Francisco News, published as "The Harvest Gypsies," that served both as journalism and as preparation for a larger work he was already planning.

Writing and the Moral Debt

Steinbeck began writing The Grapes of Wrath in June 1938 and finished it in October of the same year — a hundred days of work that he described in his journal as the most sustained effort of his life. He wrote longhand, five to six pages a day, with a discipline that he maintained through illness, doubt, and the growing anxiety that the book was becoming something larger and more important and more likely to fail than anything he had previously attempted.

He had tried a satirical version first — an angry, comic novel he called L'Affaire Lettuceberg — and abandoned it after completing it. The Okies he had met deserved something better than satire. They deserved the full weight of what had happened to them, rendered with enough specificity and enough humanity that readers who had never been poor and never been displaced could not look away. He burned the draft and started again.

The novel follows the Joad family — Tom, Ma, Pa, Rose of Sharon, Jim Casy the former preacher, and a cast of relatives and neighbors — from their foreclosed Oklahoma farm westward along Route 66 to California, where they find not the promised land but a system designed to keep them desperate and compliant. It is structured in alternating chapters: close third-person narrative following the Joads, and intercalary chapters written in a heightened, almost biblical prose that steps back to address the historical and social forces that have produced the Joads' situation. The intercalary chapters are among the most formally ambitious passages in twentieth-century American fiction.

Publication and Its Consequences

Viking Press published The Grapes of Wrath in April 1939. It sold out immediately. It sold 428,000 copies in its first year, a figure that placed it among the bestselling American novels of the century. Eleanor Roosevelt mentioned it in her newspaper column. Woody Guthrie, listening to it read aloud on a car radio during a drive across California, began writing songs in response. John Ford began adapting it for film before the year was out, and the movie, released in 1940, was seen by millions more people than had read the book.

The novel also generated a congressional investigation — from two directions simultaneously. Progressive senators called hearings to examine the conditions Steinbeck had documented, intending to address them. California agricultural interests and their allies in Congress called hearings to discredit the book, bringing in testimony from growers who insisted that the conditions described were false or grossly exaggerated. The growers' case was not helped by the fact that journalists who traveled to the Central Valley to investigate found the conditions largely as Steinbeck had described them, in some cases worse.

Oklahoma banned the book from its public schools. Kern County, California — the agricultural county at the heart of the novel's California section — banned it from its public libraries. The Associated Farmers of California, a growers' organization, published a pamphlet titled Grapes of Wrath or Wrath of Grapes? that accused Steinbeck of communism, fabrication, and deliberate incitement to class warfare. Steinbeck received death threats. He hired a security guard.

After the Grapes

Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940. He spent the war years writing journalism and propaganda, and afterwards found that neither the public nor the critics quite knew what to do with him. His later novels — East of Eden (1952), Sweet Thursday (1954), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961) — received mixed reviews. The received narrative, which persists in some quarters, is that he declined after The Grapes of Wrath. The Nobel Committee disagreed. They awarded him the prize in 1962, citing his "realistic and imaginative writing, combining as it does sympathetic humor and keen social perception." The American literary establishment, much of which had never forgiven him for being taken seriously by readers rather than critics, received the announcement with open hostility.

He died in New York in 1968, of heart failure, in the city he had failed in as a young man and returned to repeatedly throughout his life. He had spent the last years traveling — to Vietnam, where he reported on the war for Newsday in pieces that drew accusations of having abandoned his progressive principles, and to England, where he worked on a modern translation of the Arthurian legends that he never finished. He left, at the end, more unfinished business than any writer of his stature perhaps ought to have. That, too, seems right for a man whose most important work had been about people who arrived somewhere only to find it was not what had been promised.

Steinbeck in the Film

In The Great Depression, Steinbeck is the only character who moves between the worlds inhabited by the other five. He sits with the economists and the politicians in Washington; he lives, briefly, alongside the migrants in the camps. He is the film's witness — a structural role that the screenplay handles by making him nearly invisible in the early sequences, a figure glimpsed in the background taking notes, and increasingly central as the film moves toward its conclusion.

The climactic scene — Steinbeck alone in a camp tent at night, writing by lamplight while the sounds of the camp continue around him — is the only scene in the film shot in complete silence. No score. No ambient sound has been added in post-production; the only audio is what was present during filming. Director Caldwell has described it as "the scene where we try to show what writing actually is, which is a strange and private thing to happen inside a public catastrophe." Whether the scene succeeds in this ambition is something audiences have disagreed about vigorously. That it was attempted at all says something about what the filmmakers thought Steinbeck's presence in the story meant.