Working Days Read Online Free PDF

Oklahomans,” which, he reported a few weeks later, was “still a long way from finished.” Steinbeck, generally guarded with interviewers, revealed enough to journalist Louis Walther to indicate that the focus of his novel was on the salutary, irrepressible character of the migrants, who, he believed, would profoundly alter the tenor of life in California. “Their coming here now is going to change things almost as much as did the coming of the first American settlers.” Furthermore, “The Californian doesn’t know what he does want. The Oklahoman knows just exactly what he wants. He wants a piece of land. And he goes after it and gets it.” 11
    Quietly, in late January 1938, Steinbeck stopped work on “The Oklahomans” (the manuscript has never been found and it is doubtful that he had actually written a great deal on it). Judging from his comments to Louis Walther, however, it is reasonable to assume that “The Oklahomans’ ” uncomplicated duality of conception, the untangled lines of its proposed struggle, and the dispassionate tone of its narrative voice (probably a holdover from “The Harvest Gypsies”) struck Steinbeck as belonging increasingly to the reductive world of pulp fiction or wish-fulfillment. The truth was the migrant situation had worsened, and along with it, Steinbeck’s capacity for pity and his need for direct involvement had grown. The misery of the migrant condition was heating up in the winter of 1938, especially in Visalia and Nipomo (Entry #1, Note), where thousands of families were marooned by floods. From Los Gatos, Steinbeck wrote 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 sabatoging 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. No word of this outside because when I have finished my job the jolly old associated farmers will be after my scalp again (Steinbeck and Wallsten, eds., Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, p. 158).
    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, powerlessness, and anger; “The Oklahomans” could not adequately redress the injustices he had recently contemplated. “When I wrote the 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. He needed time to let them gestate before they rose to the surface of his awareness and began pushing back at him, demanding their transformation to words. From February through May 1938, the third stage of his writing development produced “L’Affaire Lettuceberg.” With this abortive—but necessary—venture, Steinbeck’s migrant subject matter took its most drastic turn, inspired by an ugly event in Salinas, California, his hometown. Earlier, in September 1936, Steinbeck had encountered the vicious clash between workers and growers in a