Selected by NYU as one of the century's best books of American journalism.

Gathered in this volume are seven long-form articles that John Steinbeck wrote in 1936 for The San Francisco News about the plight of migrant farmworkers during the Dust Bowl, accompanied by photographs by Dorothea Lange and others. Steinbeck toured the squatters' camps and Hoovervilles of California, creating unforgettable portraits of once strong, independent farmers reduced to misery. The inquisitiveness and outrage of an investigative reporter combined with the expressive powers of a novelist in his prime fueled The Harvest Gypsies, which in turn furnished the factual and emotional roots for The Grapes of Wrath and has long been hailed as an American classic in its own right.

With the inquisitiveness of an investigative reporter and the emotional power of a novelist in his prime, Steinbeck toured the squatters' camps and Hoovervilles of California. Here he found once strong, independent farmers so reduced in dignity, sick, sullen, and defeated that they had been "cast down to a kind of subhumanity." He contrasts their misery with the hope offered by government resettlement camps, where self-help communities were restoring dignity and indeed saving lives.

The Harvest Gypsies gives us an eyewitness account of the horrendous Dust Bowl migration and provides the factual foundation for Steinbeck's masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath. Included are twenty-two photographs by Dorothea Lange and others, many of which accompanied Steinbeck's original articles.