Top Highlights

• “Tom” was Tom Collins, manager of a federal migrant labor camp in the California Central Valley.
• Steinbeck met Collins three years earlier, in 1936, shortly after The San Francisco News hired the author to write the series of articles
• Tom Collins helped launch John Steinbeck on a personal and literary journey that would lead to the publication of The Grapes of Wrath.
• Steinbeck had matured into a big, rough-hewn man who masked his considerable sensitivities and insecurities behind a gruff, hard-drinking exterior.
• West asked the writer to do a series on the dust bowl migration then sweeping through rural California. Steinbeck eagerly accepted and in the summer of 1936 began touring the state’s agricultural valleys