Many of these reports were drafted by Sanora Babb, who worked for Collins and made notes in her journal each night about the Dust Bowl refugees she'd met. Steinbeck obtained significant assistance from Farm Security Administration (FSA) documents, including reports compiled by Tom Collins, manager of a federal camp for migrants in Arvin, CA. Impressed by the novel, San Francisco News editor George West commissioned Steinbeck to report on the situation with a series of articles in the fall of 1936. He first addressed the issue with his novel In Dubious Battle (1936), which took a harvesters’ strike as its subject. Steinbeck, a California native himself, sought to capture these new developments and their impact on California culture. Resultant of these conditions were the worker camps, labor strife, and horrific living arrangements described by Steinbeck in The Harvest Gypsies. The abundance of workers desperate for employment led to extraordinarily low wages, which in turn created widespread underemployment and poverty amongst the migrant workers. The number of emigrants was equal to more than twenty percent of the total population of California at the time. During this time, over one million Americans emigrated from their native states to California.

Family from Oklahoma settling in makeshift dwellingįrom 1931 to 1939, drought and soil erosion across the Midwestern and Southern Plains created one of the lasting images of the Great Depression: the Dust Bowl. Rapidly growing settlement of lettuce workers.

The harvest gypsies