In Dubious Battle

When California fruit pickers strike against starvation wages, two Communist labor organizers, Jim Nolan and the hardened Mac, arrive to turn the workers' desperation into an organized fight — and to use the strike itself, win or lose, as a lesson in the tactics of revolution.

Steinbeck tells the story with deliberate detachment, following the strike's violent escalation without endorsing either side, so the reader is left to weigh the workers' suffering against the organizers' willingness to spend other people's lives for a cause.\n\nPublished in 1936, In Dubious Battle was Steinbeck's first major critical success and the first of what is often called his labor or Dust Bowl trilogy, followed by Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939).