Throwback Thursdays” at ClimbingSky feature posts I wrote over a 15 year period for various blogs. This was first posted on April 30, 2020.

On the edge of Butte, Montana, in the Mountain View Cemetery, there is a gravestone for labor organizer/martyr Frank Little. On August 1, 1917, he was pulled from a boarding house by six armed men, dragged behind a car until his kneecaps wore away, and then lynched on a railroad bridge. A note was pinned to his chest that read “First and Last Warning.”

His granite gravestone bears the following inscription: “Slain by Capitalist Interests for Organizing and Inspiring his Fellow Men.” While re-reading/listening to Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle, Frank Little came again and again to my mind.

According to Wikipedia, before the publication of In Dubious Battle, Steinbeck wrote in a letter:

This is the first time I have felt that I could take the time to write and also that I had anything to say to anything except my manuscript book. You remember that I had an idea that I was going to write the autobiography of a Communist … There lay the trouble. I had planned to write a journalistic account of a strike. But as I thought of it as fiction the thing got bigger and bigger. It couldn’t be that. I’ve been living with this thing for some time now. I don’t know how much I have got over, but I have used a small strike in an orchard valley as the symbol of man’s eternal, bitter warfare with himself.

In Dubious Battle is a novel that explores the themes of social unrest and the search for identity.

Protagonist: Jim Nolan, initially aimless, emerges as a leader in the strike. However, he ultimately becomes a victim of the very movement he helped to lead.

Setting: The story takes place in California’s apple-growing region where migrant workers are exploited by powerful landowners.

Conflict: The novel depicts a strike initiated by the workers, which initially aims for a just cause but gradually escalates into a chaotic and violent struggle.

It is difficult not to pair In Dubious Battle with Grapes of Wrath. The experience of reading them is the same. Critic Alfred Kazin calls them Steinbeck’s “most powerful works.” Apparently contrasting them with what I remember to be my favorite Steinbeck books (next to Travels with Charley), Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat

If I were teaching high school English, I would require my students read both Grapes of Wrath and In Dubious Battle. If I were teaching creative writing, I would probably require my fiction students to read both Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat.