Friday, November 22, 2019
John Steinback, The Harvest Gypsies (1936)
John Steinback is a well-renowned author that has written many famous books like Of Mice of Men, East of Eden, and The Grapes of Wrath. However, before he wrote all of these books, Steinback wrote The Harvest Gypsies, a collection of articles that depict the hardships and triumphs of the American Migrant workers during the Great Depression.
John Steinback grew up in Salinas, California on modest means. His father worked multiple jobs and his mother was a former school teacher. Steinback grew fond of Salinas and decided to become a writer at the age of 14. Steinback would often lock himself in his room and write poems and stories. Steinback went to Stanford in 1919 but eventually dropped out and became a freelance writer.
Eventually, Steinback would go work for The Daily News in San Francisco. There, he would be commissioned to write the articles that would go in The Harvest Gypsies. To write these articles, Steinback needed documents that would give him information about the migrant workers during the Great Depression. Tom Collins, who worked for the Farm Security Administration, supplied many of these documents to Steinback by stealing journals from his worker, Sanora Babb. Sanora Babb was the one who was talking to the migrant workers and writing down their stories. Babb was trying to write her novel, Whose Names Were Unknown, but sadly Steinback’s The Harvest Gypsies got published before and Babb’s book was never published as the New York market was afraid of having two books of the same topic that year.
However, Steinback did not get all of his information from documents. Steinback personally went to talk to migrants and learned many of their stories. According to Steinback scholar, Robert DeMott, Steinback spent “countless hours...listening to migrant people, working beside them, listening to them, and sharing their problems.” With Steinback’s connection with the migrant workers, he was able to accurately display the correct form, language, nuances of dialect, and idiosyncratic tics in his articles. In fact, a lot of the descriptions about the migrant workers that were used in The Harvest Gypsies were also used in The Grapes of Wrath.
Even though The Harvest Gypsies is not as famous and well known as Steinback's other works, it still had a huge impact on Steinbeck's credibility. Robert DeMott further supports The Harvest Gypsies impact on Steinback's career as the book “solidified [Steinbeck's] credibility—both in and out of migrant camps—as a serious commentator in a league with Dorothea Lange's husband, Paul Taylor and Carey McWilliams, two other influential and respected investigators."
Sources:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Harvest_Gypsies
https://www.biography.com/writer/john-steinbeck
https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Steinbeck
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I enjoyed reading your blog post since it highlights an author that many people have heard about in a new way. I did some more research on the other books that Steinbeck wrote and many of them tie into what we have been discussing in class. For example, another popular book of his, Grapes of Wrath, also features a family of migrant workers. Also, it features live in Hoovervilles, which were small "towns" of composed of make-shift shelters used primarily by people that lost everything during the Great Depression. This really shows how literature and art can tell you so much about different periods of time.
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https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/hoovervilles
I enjoyed this blog post. I wanted to some more research on the connection Steinbeck had with the war exactly, and I found out that he was actually a war correspondent during World War II for the New York Herald Tribune and also worked for the Office of Strategic Services. He even participated in some raids and invasions. Unfortunately, he experienced trauma afterwards. He then returned to what he did best, writing books.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck
I really enjoyed this post. I love John Steinbeck, specifically East of Eden. I had never heard about The Harvest Gypsies. I found that there are seven articles and they were originally published with the purpose was to educate Americans on the hardships of the migrant workers. It was published by a non profit called the Simon J. Lubin Society. Lubin was an American businessman as well as a political activist. He was the president of the largest department store in Sacramento at the time however before that he was the president of the California Commission on immigration and housing. He incorporated Steinbeck articles to further emphasize the struggles of the migrant workers with Steinbeck's observations.
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