John Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle (1936) is the coldest and most clinical of his California labor novels — the story of a fruit strike that offers no easy heroes and no comfort, only a chain of cause and effect grinding toward violence. It's also the book that established Steinbeck as an authority on farm labor and pointed him toward The Grapes of Wrath.
Host Jordan Mattox is joined by Steinbeck scholar Dr. Jon Dawson to unpack the novel and the history beneath it: the real strikes at Tagus Ranch and in the cotton fields, the organizers who inspired — and resented — its characters, the company stores and migrant camps of California's Depression-era agricultural economy, and Steinbeck's complicated relationship to communism, ideology, and violence. Along the way they dig into naturalism and determinism, why the novel keeps its characters at arm's length, the debt the title owes to Milton, and why a labor dispute from 1933 still feels urgent today.
The first installment in our Steinbeck labor series, leading into Of Mice and Men. Plus Dr. Dawson's parallel-reading recommendation: Carey McWilliams's Factories in the Field.
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