Labor Trilogy

An informal grouping of three John Steinbeck novels set among California's dispossessed during the Great Depression: In Dubious Battle (1936), a strike novel following Communist labor organizers among fruit pickers; Of Mice and Men (1937), the tragedy of two itinerant ranch hands chasing a small piece of land; and The Grapes of Wrath (1939), the Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Joad family's exodus from the Dust Bowl to California's exploitative labor camps. The three share a setting, an era, and Steinbeck's sustained attention to migrant and agricultural labor, though each stands as an independent, complete novel.