Ninety years before California’s debates over farm labor, housing affordability and migrant workers filled today’s headlines, a young John Steinbeck set out across the Central Valley to document a humanitarian crisis unfolding in plain sight.
In the summer and fall of 1936, the future Nobel Prize-winning author traveled through Kern and Tulare counties and other agricultural regions with federal camp manager Tom Collins, investigating the lives of Dust Bowl migrants who had fled drought, economic collapse and environmental catastrophe across the Great Plains. What he found would become one of the most influential pieces of California journalism ever published.
The resulting series, ”The Harvest Gypsies,” appeared in the San Francisco News in October 1936 and exposed the poverty, starvation, crowding and exploitation faced by thousands of migrant farmworkers seeking jobs in California’s Central Valley. The articles were accompanied by photographs from legendary documentary photographer Dorothea Lange, whose images helped bring national attention to the crisis.
How John Steinbeck exposed California’s migrant worker crisis
Steinbeck’s reporting depicted a California that many residents had never seen…