The Harvest Gypsies

First edition of pamphlet

The Harvest Gypsies, by John Steinbeck, is a series of feature-story articles written on commission for The San Francisco News about the lives and times of migrant workers in California's Central Valley.[1] Published daily from October 5 to 12, 1936, Steinbeck explores and explains the hardships and triumphs of American migrant workers during the Great Depression, tracing their paths and the stories of their lives and travels from one crop harvest to the next crop harvest as they eked out a stark existence as temporary farmhands.

Drought refugees from Oklahoma camping by the roadside. They hope to work in the cotton fields. There are seven in the family. Blythe, California.
(photo by Dorothea Lange, 1936)

In 1938, the feature-story articles were published as the pamphlet Their Blood Is Strong, by the Simon J. Lubin Society, a non-profit organization dedicated to educating Americans about the socio-economic plight of the migrant worker. The pamphlet included the seven articles, plus Steinbeck's new epilogue "Starvation Under the Orange Trees" and twenty-two photographs of the migrant workers, by Dorothea Lange;[2][3] ten thousand copies of Their Blood Is Strong were sold at twenty-five cents each.[4]

  1. ^ "Steinbeck's The Harvest Gypsies". PBS. March 2013.
  2. ^ Brian E. Railsback, Michael J. Meyer, eds. A John Steinbeck Encyclopedia (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2006), 148.
  3. ^ James R. Swenson, "Focusing on the Migrant: The Contextualization of Dorothea Lange's Photographs of the John Steinbeck Committee" in A Political Companion to John Steinbeck (Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2013).
  4. ^ Robert DeMott, "Introduction" in The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck (New York: Penguin Classics, 2006), xxix.