I've just finished reading John Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle, his 1936 warmup for The Grapes of Wrath. In Dubious Battle tells the story of Jim Nolan, who joins the Communist Party in the opening scene and who spends the body of the book helping organize and execute a strike among California apple pickers. As I read the book, I kept thinking to myself that this book walks a fine line between storytelling and pamphleteering; it calls itself a novel, but it reads like a political treatise; it's hard to think of it as narrative, not hard at all to think of it as propaganda.

Interestingly, when the book was published, The New Republic registered the tension I describe by trying to efface it. Here's a snippet of the review:

In Dubious Battle cannot be dismissed as a 'propaganda' novelóit is another version of the eternal human fight against injustice. It is an especially good version, dramatically intense, beautifully written. It is the real thing; it has a vigor of sheer storytelling that may sweep away many prejudices.

To complicate matters, the propaganda that Steinbeck was said to push conflicted with his own politics: though his sympathy with the plight of migrant laborers earned him a place among leftist intellectuals, Steinbeck was a patriot who despised communism; he alienated the left with his support for the Cold War and his defense of the war in Vietnam; the U.S. government, angered that his works were being used as anti-American propaganda in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union, investigated him as a possible communist.

I don't always love Steinbeck's fiction (though I adore East of Eden), but I do like thinking about it. I especially like Steinbeck's political unplaceability, the way that his politics could not be pigeonholed; he was neither a man of the right nor the left; he was a libertarian who could criticize the runaway greed of the California growers. And I like how Steinbeck's unplaceability resulted in fiction whose philosophical origins thoroughly complicate and confound it--you think one thing about Steinbeck's mission when you just read the novels, but you think something else when you find out about his beliefs. That may mean that the fiction is a failure. But, then, it may also mean that Steinbeck has been failed by his readers.

Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. Here's an excerpt from his speech:

Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion. My great predecessor, William Faulkner, speaking here, referred to it as a tragedy of universal fear so long sustained that there were no longer problems of the spirit, so that only the human heart in conflict with itself seemed worth writing about.

Faulkner, more than most men, was aware of human strength as well as of human weakness. He knew that the understanding and the resolution of fear are a large part of the writer's reason for being.

This is not new. The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.

Furthermore, the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit - for gallantry in defeat - for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally-flags of hope and of emulation.

I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man, has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

"I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man, has no dedication nor any membership in literature"...seems like a very strange statement. Would Shakespeare qualify under this criterion? I think not...Indeed, who *would* qualify, other than (a)Communist writers of the 1930s and (b)Objectivists? (A strange pairing, to be sure...)

or someone like melville would he fit either?

I often use In Dubious Battle in a course on American Radicalism thatg I teach. I think Erin O'Connor underestimates Steinbeck's ambiguity about communism and the left. He was certainly critcial of capitalism- or at least some parts of it- but he was equally critical of communism. The battle is, after all, dubious and the portraits of the communist organizers are often harshly critical. In fact, I think you can make the case that Steinbeck understood why American workers were largely impervious to communist propaganda, even while he recognized the horrible conditions under which they worked in California agriculture.

I am doing a research paper for my high school class and have chose to do the "Glories of Communism" in Steinbecks book. I was just wondering if anyone could point me in the right direction for some resources on that. Thanks, Gary.