In 1934, perhaps the most strike-torn year in American history, Californian novelist John Steinbeck became increasingly drawn to narratives of dispossessed farm workers and labor organizers. Thinking of one of these narratives as the basis of a novel, he actually purchased the story, for instance, of some Communists organizers who had been forced to hide out near the author's home in Pacific Grove (Benson 291).1 Labor radicals who had been "helping with strikes near Watsonville, in the Santa Clara valley" (Benson 294) would stop by the Steinbeck house in Pacific Grove for meals and conversation. Apparently they were part of a "band of young radicals" who had attached themselves to Steinbeck's friends Ella Winters and Lincoln Steffens, the famous muckraking journalist. One of them, a man named John Harkins, would "became a 1 In terms of the number and intensity of strikes, lockouts and such so-called "labor violence" in the USA, 1934 has to rank right up there with such turbulent years as 1877, 1886, 1894 and 1919. See Jeremy Brecher's Strike. General strikes paralyzed San Francisco, Toledo and Minneapolis in the summer of 1934, and the gigantic textile workers' strike of that year, which saw some 350,000
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“Written in disorder”: John Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle and “The Big Strike”
Watson, Will
Follow Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture
, Volume 42 (1-2)
Duke University Press – Mar 1, 2009
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