Top Highlights

• the owners start a vigilantes committee,2 bunch of fool shoe clerks, or my friends the American Legion boys trying to pretend they aren’t middle-aged, cinching in their belts to hide their pot-bellies—there
• In Dubious Battle, generally regarded as his first major novel, was the first to stir up the kind of controversy that his fiction would subsequently arouse over serious social and political issues.
• the background for this fifth published novel was a strike of migrant pickers in California’s apple orchards, it was assumed to be one of the “proletarian” novels of the period supporting radical causes if not actually promoting the changing line of the Communist Party.
• powerful California growers’ associations that he attacked suspected him of being a card-carrying contributor to the “red conspiracy” that had been viewed as a threat to American traditions
• I wanted to be merely a recording consciousness, judging nothing, simply putting down the thing.”