In Dubious Battle, John Steinbeck. Penguin Books (1979). Cover design by Neil Stuart. 313 pages.
John Steinbeck’s underrated and under-read novel In Dubious Battle seems like a good Labor Day mass-market pick. Perhaps Steinbeck’s most radical novel, In Dubious Battle details the fight for better working conditions during the Great Depression in California’s fruit orchards. The hero is young Jim Nolan who joins a labor strike organized by the Communist Party (one of the Party’s officials is named Harry Nilson). Jim is taken under the wing of the veteran organizer Mac McLeod; the pair drive a plot that focuses on the sometimes violent conflict between the workers and the landowners, who use the police and hired thugs to attempt to break the strike. Steinbeck, as is often the case with his serious novels, caps In Dubious Battle with a devastating conclusion, the final line a howl that does not end, its dash carrying the battle into the future, our own future: “Comrades! He didn’t want nothing for himself—“
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