In Dubious Battle
Encyclopedia
In Dubious Battle is a novel by John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was an American writer. He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden and the novella Of Mice and Men...

, written in 1936
1936 in literature
The year 1936 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* Life magazine is first published.* The Carnegie Medal for excellence in children's literature is established in the UK.-New books:...

. The central figure of the story is an activist for "the Party" (presumably the American Communist Party, although it is never specifically named in the novel) who is organizing a major strike
Strike action
Strike action, also called labour strike, on strike, greve , or simply strike, is a work stoppage caused by the mass refusal of employees to work. A strike usually takes place in response to employee grievances. Strikes became important during the industrial revolution, when mass labour became...

 by fruit pickers, seeking thus to attract followers to his cause.

Prior to publication, Steinbeck wrote in a letter:

"This is the first time I have felt that I could take the time to write and also that I had anything to say to anything except my manuscript book. You remember that I had an idea that I was going to write the autobiography of a Communist. ... There lay the trouble. I had planned to write a journalistic account of a strike. But as I thought of it as fiction the thing got bigger and bigger. It couldn't be that. I've been living with this thing for some time now. I don't know how much I have got over, but I have used a small strike in an orchard valley as the symbol of man's eternal, bitter warfare with himself. "

Explanation of the novel's title

The title is a reference to a passage from Milton
John Milton
John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...

's Paradise Lost
Paradise Lost
Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton. It was originally published in 1667 in ten books, with a total of over ten thousand individual lines of verse...

:

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. What though the field be lost?

All is not lost—the unconquerable will,

And study of revenge, immortal hate,

And courage never to submit or yield:

And what is else not to be overcome?


Plot summary

In Dubious Battle deals with a fruit-workers' strike in a California valley and the attempts of communists to organize, lead, and provide for the striking pickers.

Characters

  • Doc Burton – A doctor who, despite his skepticism of leftist views, works in the strikers' camp, ensuring that it cannot be disbanded on the basis of a lack of sanitation.
  • Jim Nolan– New member of the "Party," whose political development is one of the book's central themes. His father was a Communist himself, and was legendary as one who fought.
  • London – the second, but more significant, elected leader of the striking workers
  • Mrs. Meer – Jim's landlady
  • Harry Nilson – Party official who initiates Jim's application process for the Party
  • Roy Nolan – Jim's father (killed three years earlier)
  • Mr. Webb – Manager at Tulman's Department Store, where Jim worked who denies knowing Jim when he hears he is a criminal.
  • May Nolan – Jim's older sister who mysteriously disappears at a young age
  • Mac McLeod – Party organizer
    Party organizer
    A party organizer or local party organizer is a position in some political parties in charge of the establishing a party organization in a certain locality.Herbert Ames wrote in his 1911 article "Organization of Political Parties in Canada" :...

     and Jim's mentor
  • Dick Halsing – "pretty boy" party member in charge of soliciting Party sympathizers for donations
  • Joy – insane, aggressive party member; WWI veteran
  • Alfred Anderson – Owner/operator of Al's Lunch Wagon; Communist sympathizer
  • Sam – "lean-face", a picker
  • Lisa – London's daughter-in-law who is assisted by Mac when in labor
  • Dan – an old picker who fell off a ladder and subsequently caused a momentary tumult among the workers
  • Dakin – leader of pickers at the Hunter place
  • Alla – Dakin's wife
  • Jerry – a picker at Hunter's who favors strike
  • Al Anderson – Alfred's father, small farm owner, proud of his dogs
  • Burke – Dakin's assistant
  • Albert Johnson – truck owner
  • Bolter – President of the Fruitgrower's Association who attempts to negotiate with the strikers


Literary significance and criticism

On publication, New York Times reviewer Fred T. March compared it to the "genial gusto" of the "picaresque" Tortilla Flat
Tortilla Flat
Tortilla Flat is an early John Steinbeck novel set in Monterey, California. The novel was the author's first clear critical and commercial success....

. 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
Sinclair Lewis
Harry Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of...

 at his best might have done had he gone on with his projected labor novel..."

In 1943, with Steinbeck now famous, Carlos Baker
Carlos Baker
Carlos Baker was an American writer, biographer and former Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton University. He earned his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D at Dartmouth, Harvard, and Princeton respectively. Baker's published works included several novels and books of poetry and various literary...

 "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
Bionomics
In ecology, bionomics is the comprehensive study of an organism and its relation to its environment. As translated from the French word Bionomie, its first use in English was in the period of 1885-1890. Another way of expressing this word is the term currently referred to as "ecology".# Sometimes...

, or ecology
Ecology
Ecology is the scientific study of the relations that living organisms have with respect to each other and their natural environment. Variables of interest to ecologists include the composition, distribution, amount , number, and changing states of organisms within and among ecosystems...

." He said that "Steinbeck's bionomic interest is visible in all that he has done, from Tortilla Flat, in the middle Thirties, through 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
Alfred Kazin
Alfred Kazin was an American writer and literary critic, many of whose writings depicted the immigrant experience in early twentieth century America....

 referred to In Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath
The Grapes of Wrath
The Grapes of Wrath is a novel published in 1939 and written by John Steinbeck, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962....

as "his most powerful books," contrasting them with Cannery Row
Cannery Row (novel)
Cannery Row is an English language novel by American author John Steinbeck. It was published in 1945. A film version was released in 1982. A stage version was produced in 1995....

and The Wayward Bus
The Wayward Bus
The Wayward Bus is a novel by American author John Steinbeck, originally published in 1947. Steinbeck dedicated this novel to "Gwyn", presumably a reference to his second wife Gwyndolyn Conger...

.

The novel likely recounts a fruit worker strike that occurred in Watsonville, California.
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