Uzbekistan state university of world languages english philology faculty

The aim of my course paper is problems of farmers depicted in John Steinbeck’s works
To reach the aim I put forward the following tasks:

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  to study Steinbeck’s politics
  
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  to investigate background influences
  
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  to analyse some of his famous works
  

The subject of my course paper is problems of farmers depicted in John Steinbeck’s works
The object of my course paper is why John Steinbeck aimed most of his novels towards the land owners and political figures during the Great Depression
The course paper includes introduction, 3 chapters, conclusion and list of references.
The main part includes to examine if he always felt so strongly about the corruption and injustice, and if not, what influenced him to start writing those types of novels. Furthermore, I am interested in the way he used his characters in the novels as a way to represent the many different social groups of the era and how they experienced the economic crisis. Are they as a part of the action, or does he have a greater purpose in mind for them? I aim to show how John Steinbeck put his characters through conflicting real and fantasy worlds in order to inspire the nation and send out the simple message of how there was still hope around, even though times were at their darkest. I will be looking mostly at some of his more famous novels, Of Mice and Men, Tortilla Flat, The Grapes of Wrath andThe Winter of Our Discontent, but I will, however, briefly mention some of his other stories as well.

Steinbeck’s politics

The effects of the Great Depression struck the American working class hard. Suddenly people no longer had solid ways of providing for their families. Work was hard to come by which left thousands of people applying for every hundred jobs and working the few odd jobs that were available did not earn them all that much money. This would usually meant that after a full day’s work husbands could barely afford to give their families a decent meal, and medical bills often put too much strain on the family budget. This resulted in many deaths, mostly due to starvation. A staggering number of these deaths were children, but a big portion of them resulted from minor injuries or illnesses which could have been prevented had the individuals received proper medical care.
Steinbeck spent a few years early in his career working as a journalist for the San Francisco News, and the articles he wrote there seem to pre-echo the voice that later became so important in his novels. Around 1936-8 when he was carrying out research for a seven article series for the newspaper, John Steinbeck witnessed firsthand the true and horrifying effects of the Great Depression. It was an experience that changed the way he approached novel writing. During his visit to Visalia, where he was doing the research, Steinbeck was exposed to the horrible living condition of the migrant workers. He witnessed the results of the floods, starvation and the horrid living situation that the workers had to suffer through. He witnessed firsthand how the migrant workers had lost everything and had to work hard all day without being able to feed their children, many of whom in turn did not live long. This experience had profound effects on Steinbeck, and it caused a major focus shift in him. He wanted to make the people who were at fault take responsibility for their actions. Since the newspapers would not touch subject he felt that he needed to write a story on it (Dickstein 123). The first novel in which he expressed his newly reformed attitude was The Grapes of Wrath which was published about a year later.
Steinbeck often derived the titles of his novels from various literature sources. The title of Of Mice and Men came from the poem To a Mouse by Robert Burns, The Winter of Our Discontent originated as a line in William Shakespeare’s Richard III. The title of The Grapes of Wrath has more of a complex origin. The title itself comes from Julia Ward Howe´s The Battle Hymn of the Republic, which in turn is a referral to the biblical passage “Revelation”. This passage deals with the apocalyptic appeal for justice and the freedom from oppression which is the major theme in The Grapes of Wrath.
Lois Parkinson Zamora argues that the articles Steinbeck wrote for the San Francisco News clearly showed that he felt the need for political change (52).
Steinbeck witnessed many horrifying things caused by the Great Depression during his time as a journalist and later as a war correspondent at the time of the Second World War, which truly opened his eyes to the world around him. The seven articles which he wrote for the San Francisco News read much like one of his short stories and he does not try to exaggerate the details one bit. Instead he reports them exactly as they appeared to him:
The squatters' camps are located all over California. Let us see what a typical one is like. It is located on the banks of a river, near an irrigation ditch or on a side road where a spring of water is available. From a distance it looks like a city dump, and well it may, for the city dumps are the sources for the material of which it is built. You can see a litter of dirty rags and scrap iron, of houses built of weeds, of flattened cans or of paper. It is only on close approach that it can be seen that these are homes.(Curtis, Gabrick and Markham Article II)
This opening passage from the second article in the series titled “The Harvest Gypsies” sets the tone for his later novels and paints a good picture of how the migrant workers lived. His experience working as a war correspondent would also serve as an incentive for his later novels. One of his novels, The Moon is Down, a book which focused on the Nazi conquest, became highly controversial and made people ask the question why Steinbeck was so interested in the fight against the Axis (Hyman 185). The truth most likely was because he was exposed to it so much that it inevitably had profound effects on him.
According to Morris Dickstein, Steinbeck first gained fame with his novel about the happy and joyful migrant paisanos at Tortilla Flat. Later he became commercially recognized with his novel Of Mice and Men which was considered to be his least political novel in a three novel series of migrant farm workers (113). This was the path that Steinbeck was interested in pursuing with his writings; he wanted to create memorable characters in a novel that praised the wonders of the land. These two novels are set during the Great Depression and as a result they focus on the subject. He does not seem to romanticize the migrant worker any more here than he does in his later novels. For example, the group of friends in Tortilla Flat does not seem to be too affected by the economic crisis. They are not depressed, do not seem to be dying of starvation and are never seen struggling to find work. His stories about the migrant workers did not come about because of his commitment towards being a reformer. They came from the simple fact that he was always on a look out for a story (Dickstein 117). Because he grew up in the Salinas Valley in California, he was frequently exposed to this particular subject. The migrant laborers frequented in California during the Great Depression and thus the opportunity for these stories presented themselves to Steinbeck.
The experience he gained through both his job at the San Francisco News and from his time as a war correspondent helped him set the tone for The Grapes of Wrath. In the novel he includes 16 intermediate chapters. These are chapters that do not include any of the main characters, but are there to present both the social background of the period to amplify the actions taken in the novel. They also provide the reader with important historical information such as the development of land ownership in California as well as the development of migration labor (Lisca 297). These intermediate chapters are derived from Steinbeck’s work experience from writing his newspaper articles, and they echo the voice he had started to express so clearly throughout his career as a journalist.
John Steinbeck’s earlier works seemed to carry the simple message of loving the land and enjoying life. His characters were usually placed in such a vivid scenario that the reader could not help feeling a bit patriotic. We see that in Tortilla Flat where even though the paisanos are poor and cannot hold on to a dollar longer than it takes them to buy themselves a jug of wine, they are happy and have everything they want in life. In their case it is companionship and some wine. Everything usually works out for them and they have no worries about the future. In Of Mice and Men, Lennie and George have each other and we get the sense that if they were apart, they would be more affected by the sorrow and struggle of the Great Depression. Each of them earned 50 dollars a month from working on the farm but as Steinbeck mentions in article number five of the “Harvest Gypsies” series it was difficult to hold on to even the smallest savings.
The older boy and the father together made $60. At that time the automobile broke out some teeth of the differential and the repairs, together with three second-hand tires, took $22. The family moved into Kern County to chop grapes and camped in the squatters' camp on the edge of Bakersfield. At this time the father sprained his ankle and the little girl developed measles. Doctors' bills amounted to $10 of the remaining store, and food and transportation took most of the rest. . (Curtis, Gabrick and Markham Article V)
Steinbeck starts to focus more on the seriousness of the situation with the release of The Grapes of Wrath. The events which he was exposed to during his research in Visalia had clearly made their way into the novel. We are introduced to a group of people who are forced to leave their homes and migrate over to California to find work. The journey is long and hard and a few casualties occur on the way. Once in California, they realize that work is not going to be easy to find. People from all over the country were making the same journey in hopes of finding a job. The tones of the novels from then on become darker.
The working class was forced to evacuate its homes and travel long distances across the country in hopes of finding some form of a paid work. These journeys were tedious and took their toll on the travelers. Because there was a shortage of both food and water not everyone made it to the final destination. Just as Steinbeck portrayed in the novel, the few jobs that were available did not pay well and there were claims that the employers kept their workers poor to increase their dependence. When on the rare occasions the migrant workers started to think a union, the police were called in to deter them. The employers did not want the workers to organize themselves and demand higher wages and better treatments. Any attempts to rise up against the higher authorities were quickly dispersed by the representatives of the law enforcement offices. Steinbeck includes these elements in to The Grapes of Wrath and uses his novel as a powerful weapon of political attack. The employers in the novel saw the workers who demanded better wages as being greedy and referred to them as red agitators. A red was a person who wanted 30 cents when the going rate was 25, which meant that all of the workers were reds (Dickstein 128).
Steinbeck drew his influences from various places. His love for the nature and social reforming are similar to the messages made famous by Emerson, Whitman and Thoreau. Jackson J. Benson tells us about the major influence on Steinbeck’s career. This was a man who surprisingly was not a literature figure. He was a marine biologist and a self proclaimed philosopher without a degree. It was with the help of Edward F. Ricketts that Steinbeck developed an interest for ecology. This helped shape his literary career into what we later came to know. Benson does point out that Steinbeck had shown interest in biology before being influenced by Ricketts, and while at Stanford he even asked to take a course on dissecting cadavers. His reasons for doing so were that he “wanted to understand human beings” (74). This shows his desire to fully understand his subject matter and also explains his immense attention to detail which made his novels the more powerful. Because of how influential his novels became, he helped pave the way for Folk music artists such as Woody Guthrie who felt inspired by Steinbeck’s message. Guthrie’s first album Dust Bowl Ballads even featured a two part song called “Tom Joad”.
When he started to use his writing as a tool for social protest, Steinbeck was met with some scrutiny. His ideas and social protest were even considered to be acts of Communism. He was never a Communist but rather a follower of the New Deal Democratic politics (Dickstein 124). Harold S. Nelson has labeled him a Marxist during these earlier stages of his career and maintains that as the time passed the heat and the social angst that is prominent in The Grapes of Wrath slowly started to cool down over time. He stated that “The Grapes of Wrath is radical (in the popular sense) and forward-looking; The Winter of Our Discontent is con- servative and oriented to the past” (118). Steinbeck not only intended for his novels to attack all the corruption of the political figures but he also intended for them to serve as an incentive for people to wake up and notice what was going on in their own community. He writes in the forewords to The Winter of Our Discontent: "Readers seeking to identify the fictional people and places here described would do better to inspect their own communities and search their own hearts, for this book is about a large part of America today."
Nelson goes on to suggest that Steinbeck is making the banks and the heads of the economic system to be the monsters that are terrorizing the entire population. The bank, according to Nelson, is Capitalism and it is seeding its own destruction (119). Steinbeck would frequently attack those who were in charge in the country and would accuse them of being dishonest and corrupt. Evidence supporting his claims can be found still today, especially if we look at the current economic crisis which is affecting countries all over the world. We still have the corrupt political figures dragging the world down into another crisis. The banks and insurance companies, institutions who are meant to help the citizens of the world, are still coming together to cause extended damages to the economy. Companies like AIG have caused severe damages to the economy by swallowing over 170 billion US dollars of tax payers money and then paying over 165 million dollars of it to the incompetent executives in charge (Hirsh). Just like it was in Steinbeck’s day it seems that the ones we were supposed to be able trust with our economic affairs are the ones who have let us down.
There are several reasons why Steinbeck gradually started to tone down his political views. One of them might result from the fact that the economic crisis was slowly dissolving, and the fact that Steinbeck wanted to write history as it happened (Dickstein 127). It can even be perceived that he changed his views again during his research for Travels with Charley, where he embarked on a nearly ten thousand mile trip across the United States with his dog Charley as his traveling companion. Whatever the reasons were, The Winter of Our Discontent does appear to be less openly critical and vitriolic as The Grapes of Wrath.