In Dubious Battle

THOUGH he detested publicity, John Steinbeck became one of the most
controversial American writers from the Depression of the 1930s until his death in
1968, at the height of American involvement in Vietnam. In Dubious Battle,
generally regarded as his first major novel, was the first to stir up the kind of
controversy that his fiction would subsequently arouse over serious social and
political issues. Because the background for this fifth published novel was a strike
of migrant pickers in California’s apple orchards, it was assumed to be one of the
“proletarian” novels of the period supporting radical causes if not actually
promoting the changing line of the Communist Party. The powerful California
growers’ associations that he attacked suspected him of being a card-carrying
contributor to the “red conspiracy” that had been viewed as a threat to American
traditions since World War I.
Steinbeck wrote to a friend, however, just after completing the novel, “I don’t
like communists, either. I mean I dislike them as people. I rather imagine the
apostles had the same waspish qualities and the New Testament is proof that they
had equally bad manners"—an attitude that he maintained throughout his life.*
Earlier he had written to another struggling novelist, George Albee; “I’m not
interested in strikes as a means of raising men’s wages, and I’m not interested in
ranting about justice and oppression, mere outcroppings which indicate the
condition.… The book is brutal. I wanted to be merely a recording consciousness,
judging nothing, simply putting down the thing.” Readers will discover that he
could not maintain such a detached perspective; yet at a time when the world
raged with fanatical struggles between “true believers,” he was successful in
refusing to serve any organized party or special interest group and becoming an
ideologue.