In a second interview two months later, with journalist Louis Walther on January 8, 1938, in the San Jose Mercury Herald, he apparently had not progressed much, if at all. After hitting several “snags,” he was working on a “rather long novel” called “The Oklahomans,” which was “still a long way from finished.” Steinbeck, generally guarded with interviewers, revealed enough to Walther to indicate that his novel’s focus was the salutary, irrepressible character of the “southern dust bowl immigrants” who, he believed, would profoundly alter the tenor of life in California. “Their coming here now is going to change things almost as much as did the coming of the first American settlers.” Furthermore, “the Californian doesn’t know what he does want. The Oklahoman knows just exactly what he wants. He wants a piece of land. And he goes after it and gets it.” (In The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck did not relinquish his land-hunger theme, or his belief that the migrants formed a specific phalanx group within the large national mass movement of the 1930s, but he certainly dropped his imperious tone.)
Quietly, as nearly as can be determined, between January and March of 1938, Steinbeck stopped work on “The Oklahomans.” He never mentioned it again by name, the manuscript has never been found, and—his boasts of three hundred completed pages aside—it is doubtful that he had actually written a substantial amount at all on it. In the first entry of Working Days, on February 7[?], 1938, he mentioned having written “ten pages” of an otherwise unidentified book. And six weeks later, on March 23, 1938, he again told Elizabeth Otis: “I’ve been writing on the novel but I’ve had to destroy it several times. I don’t seem to know any more about writing a novel than I did ten years ago. You’d think I would learn. I suppose I could dash it off but I want this one to be a pretty good one. There’s another difficulty too. I’m trying to write history while it is happening and I don’t want to be wrong.” These comments in February and March 1938 have long been thought to refer to the beginnings of “L’Affaire Lettuceberg” (discussed below), but they could as easily refer to one (or more) avatars of “The Oklahomans,” the Ur-Grapes of Wrath, which had not yet found its proper impetus or creative urgency. But in mulling over, rehearsing, and living with this big subject for so long, Steinbeck was staking his claim to its imaginative territory and experimenting with a way to fictionalize material that was, until then, the stuff of journalistic reportage.
The migrant situation had worsened, and along with it, Steinbeck’s capacity for anger and his need for direct involvement had grown. The misery of the workers’ condition was increasing in the winter of 1938, especially in Visalia and Nipomo, where thousands of families were marooned by floods. From Los Gatos, Steinbeck wrote to Elizabeth Otis in February:
I must go over into the interior valleys. There are about five thousand families starving to death over there, not just hungry but actually starving. The government is trying to feed them and get medical attention to them with the fascist group of utilities and banks and huge growers sabotaging the thing all along the line…. In one tent there are twenty people quarantined for smallpox and two of the women are to have babies in that tent this week. I’ve tied into the thing from the first and I must get down there and see it and see if I can’t do something to help knock these murderers on the heads…. They think that if these people are allowed to live in camps with proper sanitary facilities, they will organize and that is the bugbear of the large landowner and the corporation farmer. The states and counties will give them nothing because they are outsiders. But the crops of any part of this state could not be harvested without these outsiders. I’m pretty mad about it.
In late February and early March, Steinbeck witnessed these deplorable conditions firsthand at Visalia where, after three weeks of steady rain, “the water is a foot deep in the tents and the children are up on the beds and there is no food and no fire, and the county has taken off all the nurses because ‘the problem is so great that we can’t do anything about it.’ So they do nothing,” he again informed Elizabeth Otis on March 7, 1938. In the company of Tom Collins, Life photographer Horace Bristol (whose work appears on the cover), and other F.S.A. personnel, Steinbeck worked day and night for nearly two weeks, sometimes dropping in the mud from exhaustion, to help relieve the people’s misery, though of course no aid seemed adequate. Steinbeck was supposed to be doing an article for Life magazine, but what he encountered was so devastating, he told Otis, that he was utterly transfixed by the “staggering” conditions; the “suffering” was so great that objective reporting would only falsify the moment. Suddenly, Steinbeck realized that the issue was not as simple as portraying the “naive directness” of the migrants’ desire for land. Indeed, the cauldron of his own soul was beginning to boil with frustration and impotence. Apparently neither “The Oklahomans” nor the proposed magazine article could adequately redress the injustices he had recently witnessed. “When I wrote The Grapes of Wrath,” he declared in a 1952 Voice of America radio interview, “I was filled… with certain angers… at people who were doing injustices to other people.”