The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath

Cultural Writing. Journalism. Introduction by Charles Wollenberg. Listed in NYU's "Top 100 List of the Century's Best American Journalism," this best-selling volume gathers seven newspaper articles on migrant farmworkers written for the San Francisco News in 1936 by John Steinbeck, three years before he wrote 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 so reduced in dignity, 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 communities were restoring dignity and indeed saving lives. THE HARVEST GYPSIES gives us an eyewitness account of the horrendous Dust Bowl migration and provides the factual foundation for Steinbeck's masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath. 22 B&W photos