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In Dubious Battle “Courageous and honest, dramatic and realistic, In Dubious Battle is the best labor and strike novel to emerge from contemporary economic and social unrest.” –Fred T. Marsh, New York Times Book Review, 1936 FIRST EDITION of one of Steinbeck’s most accomplished and influential works. In 1935, Steinbeck “attended a few meetings of nearby Carmel's John Reed Club. Although he found the group's zealotry distasteful, he, like so many intellectuals of the 1930s, found the communists' stance unassailable: workers suffered. Intending to write a ‘biography of a strikebreaker,’ he interviewed a fugitive organizer, and from the words of that hounded man came not a biography but one of the best strike novels written in the twentieth century, In Dubious Battle. Not a partisan novel, it dissects with a steady hand both the ruthless organizers and the grasping landowners. The author focuses not on who will win the struggle between organizers and farmers but on how profound is the effect on the workers trapped in between, manipulated by both interests.” (ANB). New York: Covici Friede, 1936. Book fine, dust jacket with very mild toning to spine (much less than usual) and a few spots of soiling; small chip at spine end and crease at hinge. An excellent copy, rare in this condition. $4700.
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