In Dubious Battle
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In Dubious Battle is a novel by John Steinbeck, written in 1936. It details the struggle for survival of white agricultural migrant workers in Depression era California. The central figure of the story is an activist for "the Party" (the American Communist Party, although it is never specifically named in the novel) who is organizing a major strike by the workers, seeking thus to attract followers to his cause. In Steinbeck's obituary, the New York Times said that "Although the writer's sympathies were clearly with the strikers... he pictured them as exploited both by the capitalists and the Communists."
Prior to publication, Steinbeck wrote in a letter:
- The talk...is what is usually called vulgar. I have worked along with working stiffs and I have rarely heard a sentence that had not some bit of profanity in it. And in books I am sick of the noble working man talking very like a junior college professor. [The novel] is not controversial enough to draw the support of either the labor or the capital side although either may draw controversial conclusions from it, I suppose.
The title is a reference to a passage from Milton's Paradise Lost:
- Innumerable force of Spirits armed,
- That durst dislike his reign, and, me preferring,
- His utmost power with adverse power opposed
- In dubious battle on the plains of Heaven,
- And shook His throne.
On publication, New York Times Fred T. March compared it to the "genial gusto" of the "picaresque" Tortilla Flat. He commented that "You would never know that In Dubious Battle was by the same John Steinbeck if the publishers did not tell you so." He called it "courageous and desperately honest," "the best labor and strike novel to come out of our contemporary economic and social unrest," and "such a novel as Sinclair Lewis at his best might have done had he gone on with his projected labor novel..."
In 1943, with Steinbeck now famous, Carlos Baker "revalued" the novel. He opened by saying "Among Steinbeck's best novels, the least known is probably In Dubious Battle." Steinbeck, he said, "is supremely interested in what happens to men's minds and hearts when they function, not as responsible, self-governing individuals, but as members of a group.... Biologists have a word for this very important problem; the call it bionomics, or ecology." He said that "Steinbeck's bionomic interest is visible in all that he has done, from Tortilla Flat, in the middle Thirties, though his semi-biological Sea of Cortez, to his latest communiqués as a war correspondent in England." He characterized In Dubious Battle as "an attempt to study a typical mid-depression strike in bionomic terms."
In 1958, critic Alfred Kazin referred to In Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath as "his most powerful books," contrasting them with Cannery Row and The Wayward Bus which, he said, "contain many pleasant things" but "are not in the same class."
References
- "In Dubious Battle and Other Recent Works of Fiction," Fred T. March, New York Times, February 2, 1936, p. BR7
- "In Dubious Battle Revalued," Carlos Baker, July 25, 1943, p. BR4
- "The Unhappy Man from Happy Valley," Alfred Kazin, New York Times, May 4, 1958 p. BR1