John Steinbeck saw a fair amount of misery in his lifetime. It wasn't anything personal: he grew up in an affluent family, spent six years—count 'em—half-heartedly not getting a degree from Stanford, and had a pretty good life in general.

Nope, that misery had everything to do with 1930s America.

Steinbeck watched as desperate migrants poured into his home state of California, looking for shelter and work after the Dust Bowl gobbled up their farms and their independence. So this is where his famous novel The Grapes of Wrath comes in, right?

Wrong. Before we ever get Steinbeck's 1940 classic portrayal of migrant misery, In Dubious Battle gave America a glimpse of the poverty and injustice living right in the heart of the lushest and richest lands in the country. It opened a lot of eyes—and created a lot of enemies for Steinbeck.

In In Dubious Battle, Steinbeck does his best to offer an impartial take on the struggle between organized labor and Big Ag (that's "corporate agriculture" to you and me), which was already around in the 1930s. Steinbeck first thought he would write the story as a piece of journalism, but his publisher encouraged him to go the novel route. The result is a fictional story that refuses—for the most part—to give us any easy answers about a real and persistent social problem.

Steinbeck kind of botches the impartiality experiment—readers clearly sympathize with Communist agitators Mac and Jim, and with the oppressed workers they try to organize. If you hate the thuggery of the Growers' Association, well—okay. You've got the right idea.

Yet Steinbeck doesn't let either side off the hook. Everyone is out to manipulate the workers (and public opinion), and the whole "man's inhumanity to man" thing rears its ugly head on both sides of the aisle.

The tragedy at the core of the work has nothing to do with the fate of individual characters; it's the sense that all this suffering will have happened for nothing. That's likely the clearest reason Steinbeck had for bearing witness to it in his writing. And it's scary to think about it, but hey, has that much changed since the 1930s? We've still got all of these problems. How are we supposed to face them?

Don't worry, Shmoopers. Steinbeck's got a few ideas, and we're here to get you through them.

If you've ever seen Dorothea Lange's famous portrait of a migrant mother and her children, your consciousness has already been shaped by the history of labor struggles in the United States.

And what do we mean by that, you rightly ask?

Well, it's kind of like this. If you've ever had an elderly relative who wouldn't let you throw out so much as a spoonful of peas, you're part of the legacy of the Depression era and the hardships that displaced millions of rural workers between 1930 and 1940. The Depression affected pretty much everyone, and we haven't forgotten about it even decades later.

Steinbeck doesn't just involve us in the suffering of the migrant workers in this novel; he also presents a huge dilemma to the average American living in relative comfort. Do we extend a hand to those millions pouring over the border to a land of plenty? Or do we close the borders in an attempt to save jobs and preserve our own interests?

And hey, folks, this stuff is still a pretty big deal. Think much has changed since the 1930s? The details may be different, but we've still got our 1%, our disgruntled workers, our squeezed middle class, and our young-ish people trying to figure out how to live meaningful lives and make things better. As Steinbeck shows, the situation is pretty complicated, and no one's a saint—but the problems are real, and they've got to be faced.

It might be time to ask, What Would Steinbeck Do?