In the first piece for the San Francisco News, Steinbeck describes the plight of families fleeing the Dust Bowl, who, “arrive in California usually having used up every resource to get here, even to the selling of the poor blankets and utensils and tools on the way to buy gasoline. ( In a cruel twist, Babb’s book was pulled from publication because her publisher feared it would get no attention after the success of The Grapes of Wrath.) Many of these documents were custom built for a novelist, having been given to Collins by Sanora Babb, who was planning her own book about the migrants. As well as speaking to people there, he was given vital research materials by the camp’s manager, Tom Collins. He visited Weedpatch Camp, which eventually featured in The Grapes of Wrath.

This event, in turn, helped Steinbeck win the commission to write a series of articles for the San Francisco News titled The Harvest Gypsies – and so took him still deeper into that world.

In a case of life mirroring art, in September 1936 a pitched battle broke out there between the workers and, as Melvyn Bragg describes them, “the forces of agribusiness (stiffened by 250 proto-fascist American Legionnaires and 2,000 local vigilantes)”. His home town, Salinas, was also the site of a camp for workers in the nearby fields. In 1936, he wrote a less famous novel called In Dubious Battle, inspired by the California agricultural strikes that had been going since 1933. And even though the book was written in a rapid fury, it had had a long genesis.Īs that letter to his agent implies, Steinbeck had known about the sufferings of migrant workers for years. But like plenty of legends, it doesn’t tell the whole truth: Steinbeck backed up his burst of creativity with a period of careful and calmer editing. This furious effort has since passed into legend not least because the urgency Steinbeck dedicated to his craft is so clearly replicated in the sincerity and passion of The Grapes of Wrath. On 26 October 1938, he wrote: “I am so dizzy I can hardly see the page.” Mercifully, later on that same day, he added: “Finished … and I hope to God it’s good.”

I wish that.” And then: “I’m afraid this book is going to pieces. And then: “My nerves are going fast … I wish I could go to a furnished room some place where I know no one and just disappear for a while. “I hope I’m not heading for a nervous breakdown,” he wrote. “For the first time I’m working on a real book that is not limited … It will take every bit of experience and thought and feeling that I have.”

I haven’t any choice,” he confided in the diary he kept while writing. “This must be a good book, it simply must.

The grapes of wrath audio book