The Grapes of Wrath Read Online Free PDF Page B

experimenting with a way to fictionalize material that was, until then, the stuff of journalistic reportage.
    The migrant situation had worsened, and along with it, Steinbeck’s capacity for anger and his need for direct involvement had grown. Themisery of the workers’ condition was increasing in the winter of 1938, especially in Visalia and Nipomo, where thousands of families were marooned by floods. From Los Gatos, Steinbeck wrote to Elizabeth Otis in February:
    I must go over into the interior valleys. There are about five thousand families starving to death over there, not just hungry but actually starving. The government is trying to feed them and get medical attention to them with the fascist group of utilities and banks and huge growers sabotaging the thing all along the line…. In one tent there are twenty people quarantined for smallpox and two of the women are to have babies in that tent this week. I’ve tied into the thing from the first and I must get down there and see it and see if I can’t do something to help knock these murderers on the heads…. They think that if these people are allowed to live in camps with proper sanitary facilities, they will organize and that is the bugbear of the large landowner and the corporation farmer. The states and counties will give them nothing because they are outsiders. But the crops of any part of this state could not be harvested without these outsiders. I’m pretty mad about it.
    In late February and early March, Steinbeck witnessed these deplorable conditions firsthand at Visalia where, after three weeks of steady rain, “the water is a foot deep in the tents and the children are up on the beds and there is no food and no fire, and the county has taken off all the nurses because ‘the problem is so great that we can’t do anything about it.’ So they do nothing,” he again informed Elizabeth Otis on March 7, 1938. In the company of Tom Collins,
Life
photographer Horace Bristol (whose work appears on the cover), and other F.S.A. personnel, Steinbeck worked day and night for nearly two weeks, sometimes dropping in the mud from exhaustion, to help relieve the people’s misery, though of course no aid seemed adequate. Steinbeck was supposed to be doing an article for
Life
magazine, but what he encountered was so devastating, he told Otis, that he was utterly transfixed by the “staggering” conditions; the “suffering” was so great that objective reporting would only falsify the moment. Suddenly, Steinbeck realized that the issue was not as simple as portraying the “naive directness” of the migrants’ desire for land. Indeed, the cauldron of his own soul was beginning to boil with frustration and impotence. Apparently neither“The Oklahomans” nor the proposed magazine article could adequately redress the injustices he had recently witnessed. “When I wrote
The Grapes of Wrath
,” he declared in a 1952 Voice of America radio interview, “I was filled… with certain angers… at people who were doing injustices to other people.”
    As a novelist, Steinbeck often experienced a delayed reaction to piercing events. Perhaps as early as February—but certainly no later than early April (“New book goes very fast but I am afraid it is pretty lousy. I don’t care much,” he said to Otis on April 26, 1938)—through approximately mid-May 1938, Steinbeck worked at the third stage of his effort and produced “L’Affaire Lettuceberg.” With this abortive—but necessary—side-track venture, Steinbeck’s migrant subject matter took its most drastic turn, inspired by an ugly event in Salinas, California, his home town. Earlier, in September 1936, Steinbeck had encountered the vicious clash between workers and growers in a lettuce strike: “There are riots in Salinas and killings in the streets of that dear little town where I was born,” he told novelist George Albee. The strike was smashed with “fascist” terrorism, and recollections of the