John Steinbeck - In Dubious Battle

Pros: A passionate evocation of the struggle for farmworkers' rights in the 1930's.
Cons: Often lacking in subtlety and nuance.

If you travel down Highway 101 these days through Gilroy, and cut over to the coastal location of the new California State University at Monterey Bay, you’ll pass through fields of artichokes, rows of asparagus and lifetimes of meaning and struggle....

Pros: A gripping strike novel with a large heart.
Cons: Steinbeck cheats, and the capitalists are too nasty to be real.

At the end of the first chapter of John Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle, Jim Nolan says to Harry, the man who is in the process of accepting his application into the Communist Party of America, “Did you ever work at a job where, when you got enough skill ...

Pros: A harsh, brilliant early Steinbeck novel of fruit pickers in 1930's California.
Cons: Steinbeck's raw passion not so refined as it becomes in Of Mice and Men, etc.

Every year, somewhere in America, an idealistic or at least unsuspecting teacher gets challenged, sometimes brought up on charges, occasionally fired, for having a sophomore or junior English class (usually in a rural school district) read John...