Name: The Harvest Gypsies
Rating: 3.5 (2 reviews)

John Steinbeck

Here are seven articles written by John Steinbeck in 1936 as he toured squatters camps and Hoovervilles in California's migrant labor region, led by his friend Tom Collins, manager of a federal migrant labor camp. Steinbeck's personal and literary response led him to dedicate the novel "The Grapes of Wrath" (1939) in part to Tom.

On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath

The Harvest Gypsies

A collection of newspaper articles about Dust Bowl migrants in California’s Central Valley by the author of The Grapes of Wrath, accompanied by photos. Three years before his triumphant novel The Grapes of Wrath—a fictional portrayal of a Depression-era family fleeing Oklahoma during a disastrous period of drought and dust storms—John Steinbeck wrote seven articles for the San Francisco News about these history-making events and the hundreds of thousands who made their way west to work as farm laborers. 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 rural California. The Harvest Gypsies gives us an eyewitness account of the horrendous Dust Bowl migration, and provides the factual foundation for Steinbeck’s masterpiece. Included are twenty-two photographs by Dorothea Lange and others, many of which accompanied Steinbeck’s original articles. '”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 “Steinbeck’s journalism shares the enduring quality of his famous novel…Certain to engage students of both American literature and labor history.”—Publishers Weekly

javi

Collects seven newspaper articles on migrant farm workers, squatters' camps and the Hoovervilles of California that the author wrote for The San Francisco News in 1936, providing the factual foundation for the The Grapes of Wrath published three years later. Reissue.

The Harvest Gypsies On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath

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