A R T I C L E S

John Steinbeck, mid 1930s

Figure 1. “‘The Grapes of Wrath’: John Steinbeck writes a major novel about Western migrants.” LIFE 6,no. 23 (5 June1939). LIFE © 1939 Time Inc. Used with Permission.

OV E R S E V E R A L W E E K E N D S in the winter of 1937 HoraceBristol (1908–1997), staff photographer for LIFE magazine, trav-eled to California’s Central Valley to photograph migrant laborcamps. His traveling companion was the author John Steinbeck,and, according to Bristol, the pair planned to collaborate on abook project, with Steinbeck contributing text to accompany Bris-tol’s photographs. Bristol also asserted that soon after the trip, inMay 1938, Steinbeck decided not to be part of the proposed proj-ect, and instead completed the final draft of his classic novel TheGrapes of Wrath which, unknown to Bristol, Steinbeck had beenworking on prior to their visits to the camps.

When Steinbeck’s novel debuted on 14 April 1939, Bristol’sphotographs remained unpublished. When the book became abestseller—it sold over 200,000 copies in its first two monthsof release—LIFE published a few of Bristol’s photographs, al-though not in the social documentary manner he had envi-sioned. In a 5 June 1939 photo-essay entitled “‘The Grapes ofWrath’: John Steinbeck writes a major novel about westernmigrants,” nine Bristol photos illustrated “truths” described inthe book, with excerpts from The Grapes of Wrath underneatheach photograph as well as a few newly penned captions writ-ten specifically for the article (Fig. 1). Soon thereafter, DarrylZanuck purchased the film rights for The Grapes of Wrath for$75,000. The movie version premiered in 1940, starringHenry Fonda and directed by John Ford. With the release ofthe film, LIFE printed Bristol’s photographs on another occa-

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sion. In a 19 February 1940 pictorial essay, “Speaking of Pic-tures…These by Life Prove Facts in ‘Grapes of Wrath,’” sixBristol pictures are juxtaposed with film stills (Fig. 2). HereLIFE used a few of Bristol’s approximately one-thousand im-ages to illustrate the similarities between the film and the pho-tographs—and, in actuality, Twentieth Century-Fox hadborrowed photographs from Bristol to assist them in casting thefilm. Both LIFE articles emphasize that the photographs provethe facts of the book and the movie—notice how explicitly LIFEpoints this out in the article’s title: “These by Life Prove Facts.”The anonymous author reiterates this point: “Never before hadthe facts behind a great work of fiction been so carefully re-searched by the newscamera” (11). The wording of both com-ments implies that photography is the most objective andtruthful of media, providing the necessary proof that Steinbeck’sbook was an accurate account of migrant life. A comparablestance was taken when LIFE presented the film in late January1940 as the “Movie of the Week” under the headline: “TheGrapes of Wrath: Zanuck’s sharecroppers are true to life” (Fig. 3).

Taking the reception of Bristol’s Dust Bowl photographs byLIFE before and after the publication of Steinbeck’s book andthe release of the film as my starting point, this essay exam-ines the way LIFE implemented its picture magazine philoso-phy around principles specifically constructed to appeal to1930s America. At the same time, by looking at how Depres-sion-era Americans reacted to the notion of truth in conjunc-tion with the photographs themselves, I offer a closer versionof the truth of Bristol’s affiliation with Steinbeck—an affilia-tion that produced, Bristol recalled years later, photographsthat Steinbeck “didn’t really want” (Bristol CD).

When the book was first published, one of the central debatesabout The Grapes of Wrath focused on the accuracy or falsity of thetext. An historical novel about dispossessed Oklahoma farmersstruggling for justice and dignity during the Great Depression, thebook addresses issues of class and economic differences, as wellas discrimination in a hostile social and agricultural environment.Negative reactions attributed to the book’s vulgar language,open sexuality, propagandistic impulse, and Communist im-plications were often an excuse for an inability to deal with thedifficult story Steinbeck told. We can see this in the way com-mentators described their dissatisfaction with the novel, fo-

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cusing simultaneously on objections to the book’s “obscenity”while questioning its truthfulness. The Oklahoma City Timesran many stories on Steinbeck and the Dust Bowl migrants,nearly 300,000 of whom traveled to California in the secondhalf of the thirties. A 4 May 1939 editorial tellingly headlined“Grapes of Wrath? Obscenity and Inaccuracy” sums up thegeneral stance of the novel’s dissenters: “It pictures Oklahomawith complete and absurd untruthfulness” (rptd. in Donohue54). In August, the Oklahoma City Times’ debate re-ignitedwhen the movie filming was to begin: “Enough fault wasfound with the facts in Joseph [sic] Steinbeck’s book on the‘okies.’…someone should protest the inaccurate and unfairtreatment the state seems to be about to receive in the filmingof the picture” (rptd. in Donohue 61). Here the writer againnotes Steinbeck’s lack of truthfulness and asks for assistancein absolving the state from wrongdoing. Oklahoman Lyle H.

Figure 2. “Speaking of Pictures…These by Life Prove Facts in ‘Grapes of Wrath.’” LIFE 8, no. 8 (19 February 1940).LIFE © 1940 Time Inc. Used with Permission.

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Boren’s congressional address in 1940 also centers on theissue of truth, once more citing obscenity and then describingSteinbeck’s misuse of facts. It is worth quoting him at length:

I cannot find it possible to let this dirty, lying,filthy manuscript go heralded before the publicwithout a word of challenge or protest….As a citizenof Oklahoma, I would have it known that I resent,for the great State of Oklahoma, the implications inthat book….I arise to say to you, my colleagues, andto every honest, square-minded reader in America,that the painting Steinbeck made in his book is a lie,a damnable lie, a black, infernal creation of a

Figure 3. “Movie ofthe Week: The Grapes

of Wrath, Zanuck’ssharecroppers are

true to life.” LIFE 8,no. 4 (22 January

1940). LIFE © 1940Time Inc. Used with

Permission.

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twisted, distorted mind….this book portrays onlyJohn Steinbeck’s unfamiliarity with facts and hiscomplete ignorance of his subject….his completedisregard for the truth….Some have said this bookexposes a condition and a character of people, butthe truth is this book exposes nothing but the totaldepravity, vulgarity, and degraded mentality of theauthor. (139, 140)

Critiques of the novel were widespread. In a November1939 Forum article, journalist Frank J. Taylor described Cali-fornia’s reaction to the publication (the Kern County board ofsupervisors banned the book earlier that year and had begun astatewide campaign to censor the novel): “Californians arewrathy over The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck’s best-sellingnovel of migrant agricultural workers. Though the book is fic-tion, many accept it as fact” (232). Many readers did not fullyunderstand that the book was a fictionalized account of trueoccurrences and that the Joads were not real people, only mod-eled after typical migrants. Taylor did grasp this nuance, andat least objected to the novel on grounds consistent withSteinbeck’s intent. He concluded that the Joad family experi-ence at the hands of pitiless California farmers was “anythingbut typical” (232). Taylor’s argument is based on first-hand in-terviews, “two reportorial tours of the agricultural valleys”(232), research that indicated there was “no red tape about get-ting free food or shelter” (232), and a review of surveyswherein he did not find statistics showing migrant families aslarge as the Joads (232). In detail, he refutes Steinbeck’s facts,ultimately concluding that what those successful migrants“have done can be done by others. Their accomplishment is achallenge to shiftless Okies and an answer to the broad accu-sations hurled so heedlessly in The Grapes of Wrath” (238).

Within two months of the novel’s release, Marshall V. Har-tranft published a full-scale rebuttal, Grapes of Gladness: Cali-fornia’s Refreshing and Inspiring Answers to John Steinbeck’s“Grapes of Wrath,” which delineated a migrant family’s posi-tive experience in California. George Thomas Miron’s TheTruth about John Steinbeck and the Migrants, also from 1939,similarly challenged Steinbeck’s claims. Miron describes a pe-riod when the author posed as a migrant, averaging four dol-

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lars in wages per day, and rather than being replaced by newcom-ers who would work for lower wages was asked by the landownersto remain in their employ. The following year, Los Gatos novel-ist—and wife of California’s Republican state senator—RuthComfort Mitchell wrote Of Human Kindness, a maudlin novelchallenging Steinbeck’s portrayal of California farm life.

Even the positive assessments of the novel weighed in onthe text’s verity. Joseph Henry Jackson, who later contributedthe introduction to the Limited Editions Club 1940 publica-tion of The Grapes of Wrath, wrote a review titled “The FinestBook John Steinbeck Has Written.” After summarizing thenovel, Jackson places the narrative in its larger cultural contextand proclaims, “For the story itself, it is completely authentic”(3). The public was both offended and attracted to Steinbeck’snovel, and whether the response was negative or positive, thequestion of truth stood at the core of the evaluation.

Ironically, the negative rejoinders, not Steinbeck’s novel,demonstrate how easily facts can be manipulated to suit one’spurposes; the examples we find in our research and analysesoften comply with our preconceived notions. In a post-modernworld this type of discourse is prevalent, but in 1930s Americathese kinds of self-conscious theoretical ideas were yet to befleshed out, or at least discussed. Taylor, for example, wentinto the field searching for data to discount Steinbeck’s por-trayal, to supplement his argument, and to exonerate Califor-nians. If Taylor had sought to corroborate Steinbeck’s story, hewould have been, most likely, just as successful. Taylor andSteinbeck’s respective “stories” based on field research showhow words can be refuted with other words, subject to variedinterpretations and misunderstanding, and of course dis-missed on the grounds that the author’s bias infused the ac-count. In Steinbeck’s case, it was argued most often that hisliberal, leftist, anti-capitalist sympathies led to his false chron-icle of migrant life. The two differing conclusions Taylor andSteinbeck reach fittingly demonstrate the fluidity of truth.

Bristol and SteinbeckBristol’s migrant worker venture was inspired both by his

admiration of Margaret Bourke-White’s and Erskine Cald-well’s photo-essay on sharecroppers, You Have Seen Their Faces(1937), and his 1936 trips with Farm Security Administration

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photographer Dorothea Lange and her husband, Paul Taylor—aprofessor of economics at the University of California at Berke-ley and head of the California Rural Rehabilitation Administra-tion—to California’s Central Valley, where they wereresearching their subsequent publication: An American Exodus(1939) (one photograph in the book is Bristol’s). Bristol re-membered: “They both had such a sympathetic attitude towardthese people….We Californians looked down on these people aslazy interlopers. We had a very poor opinion originally, notthinking that these were really refugees from an environmentalsituation. Of course, Lange didn’t feel this way, nor did Dr. Tay-lor. After I worked with Dorothea I wanted to do a story. Ithought it would be a really great essay for LIFE….I was a staffphotographer and I went to them and I said, ‘here’s a great story.I’d like to do it.’ And they weren’t interested in it” (Bristol CD).After LIFE rejected the photographer’s idea to create a photo-essay for the magazine about migrant farm workers, Bristol,who had just read In Dubious Battle (1936)—Steinbeck’s sympa-thetic account of a group of workers who stage a strike in Cali-fornia—asked the author to join him on a journey to Visalia, aregion south of Fresno, to create a book-length pictorial essay onmigrant life. Bristol did have an offer from Fortune to publishthe photo-essay in a series but Steinbeck, Bristol explained,“wouldn’t work for that capitalist magazine” (Bristol CD). Com-mitted instead to a full-length book, over the several weekendsthey traveled together Bristol would pack his station wagon withfood for the workers and pick up Steinbeck in Los Gatos.

Like Steinbeck, Bristol was a native Californian, and the pairwere deeply concerned about the miserable living conditions ofthe Dust Bowl refugees in their home state. In a short writtencontribution to the Steinbeck Newsletter in 1988, Bristol recalledthat on their long drives “and in our motel room at night, wetalked mostly of the state of the world, seldom of the people wesaw in the camps, for their agonies were almost too much to livewith 24 hours a day” (8). Perhaps Bristol and Steinbeck alsospoke about issues relating to their project—what cross-sectionof migrants they planned to approach, the form their photo-essay would take, and their mutual concern with migrant laborproblems. It can be safely said that they did not talk about Stein-beck’s full interest in migrant life and the work the author hadpreviously completed about the workers’ plight.

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As others have demonstrated, Steinbeck’s work on migrantlabor before his excursion with Bristol is significant (e.g., De-Mott). In August 1936, the San Francisco News commissionedSteinbeck to write a series of articles chronicling California’sfarm labor issues. To prepare for this assignment, that fall Stein-beck visited a federal labor camp in Arvin, California. TomCollins, to whom The Grapes of Wrath was later dedicated and onwhom the book’s character Jim Rawley was modeled, accompa-nied and introduced Steinbeck to migrant life in his position ascamp manager. Steinbeck’s observations about camp life andhis recommendations to improve the squatter’s conditions werepublished by the News in seven-parts from October 5 to 12 andwere accompanied by photographs, including Dorothea Lange’sthen-recent photo and now iconic image of the period, MigrantMother (1936). Updated and illustrated, the News’s articles werelater distributed in pamphlet form, titled Their Blood is Strong, bythe Simon J. Lubin Society, a group fighting for farm workers’rights (1938). When published as Their Blood is Strong, Lange’sphotographs again illustrated the text. Preceding his project forthe News, Steinbeck contributed an article for the 12 September1936 edition of the Nation entitled “Dubious Battle in Califor-nia,” a short summary of migrant life based on informationfrom the Resettlement Administration, not first-hand research.Steinbeck had also worked on two fictional accounts describingthe migrant experience, “The Great Pig Sticking” and “L’AffaireLettuceberg,” both of which the author destroyed. At the timethat Steinbeck and Bristol set off for Visalia, the author noted ina January 1939 letter to his publisher, he had been conceptualiz-ing The Grapes of Wrath for three years (Letters 176). Bristol,however, pleaded ignorance of these projects, explaining thatSteinbeck “never told me” about his past interest in the migrantworkers: “Looking back, this was rather strange because, youknow, you don’t keep that kind of thing confidential if you’reworking on a book together” (Bristol CD).

After developing the photographs, Bristol took approxi-mately forty-five prints to show Steinbeck. According to Bris-tol it was at this time that Steinbeck told the photographer thathe did not want to participate in a photo-essay collaboration:“‘Horace, I’m sorry. This is too great a story to just be confinedto a photographic book and I’m going to write it as a novel,”Bristol reported Steinbeck saying (Bristol CD). Bristol gra-

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ciously accepted the news and recalled thinking: “I agreedwith him. I mean it was too great a story and his writing itcould have so much more influence. Photographic booksaren’t terribly well-known whereas a novel can be and was”(Bristol CD). When characterizing Steinbeck’s reaction to thephotographs, Bristol also provides a good reason why LIFE re-jected the article proposal: “They are kind of strong pictures ofthe actual people. You get an idea of, you know, what they’relike. They’re too much” (Bristol CD). Bristol’s understandingof his photographs as “too much” relates to America’s concep-tion of truth at the time—a notion that LIFE fostered.

“Truth” in the ThirtiesAs evidenced by the two disparate reactions to Steinbeck’s

novel (truthful or inaccurate), Americans were conflicted inthe 1930s. They wanted to know the effects of the Depression,but at the same time were unsure how to respond to the im-plications of such information. Denial, despair, and hopeless-ness were among the potential reactions, and after gaugingthese possibilities the government often withheld informa-tion. At times the Hoover administration believed that sup-pressing the entirety of the crisis from America’s citizenswould prevent lagging spirits. Not only did spirits remain low,however, but the government also created an environmentwhere Americans disbelieved much of what they did hear.America’s suspicious nature did not abate after FDR took of-fice in March 1933, although information was somewhat morereadily available. That same year, journalist and cultural criticGilbert Seldes accurately perceived that America “had turnedsour, cynical, disbelieving,” and that truth is “an essentialthing for the health of a community,” which had been shieldedfrom “the reality of our situation” (emphasis in original) (4, 11).In 1935, the pseudonymous George Michael wrote Handout, abest-selling book revealing the censorship practices of theRoosevelt administration. The New York Times Book Review re-futed the exposé, pronouncing most of the text as false whileagreeing “that the administration is ‘making propaganda’ is un-deniable” (Davis 5, 17). Similarly, Theodore G. Joslin, press sec-retary to President Hoover, described Roosevelt’s admini-stration to the National Republican Club in New York City: “Thepresent administration is the most publicized administration in

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all history. It is using to the ultimate every known agency of pub-licity, the newspapers, magazines, the radio and the movietone.Its purpose is to get before the people such information as itwants them to have” (“New Deal is Chided” 2).

The prevalence of propaganda was such that academics tookon the subject. In 1935 an exhaustive 450-page annotated bibliog-raphy titled Propaganda and Promotional Activities was producedto, in the words of a New York Times reviewer, “portray a force thathas achieved such proportions and consequences” (“Propa-ganda’s Scope” 15). James L. McCamy, a Social Studies facultymember at Bennington College in the thirties, wrote a book ongovernment publicity practices during the years 1937–38, com-plete with five Farm Security Administration photographs, in-cluding Dorothea Lange’s ubiquitous Migrant Mother. In anaddress from the mid-1930s compiled in a 1937 book of essays en-titled Living in Crisis, Ernest Hatch Wilkins, President of OberlinCollege, tied the notions of truth and propaganda together.Wilkins’s speech provided his student body with seven qualities ofstudent life that differ from life in greater society; the seventh ofthose differences was truth. Wilkins explained that on the collegecampus truth “is central….We are dedicated here to the struggle todiscern truth and to advance truth: to gather relevant facts thor-oughly, and to interpret them objectively….We are committed tothe principle of absolute loyalty to the truest truth we can discern.But in the background [he refers here to the world outside the col-lege campus] truth is jostled aside by haste, by thoughtless habit,by credulousness, by prejudice, by propaganda, by flagrant dis-honesty” (Wilkins 19).

Indeed, propaganda was a hot topic. Advertising was sosuspect that when Gimbels embarked on an ad campaign inthe early thirties, the department store adopted the motto“Gimbels tells the whole truth.” Americans became so wary ofjournalistic and public accounts that when authors pennednon-fiction they felt compelled to point out their righteous in-tentions. James Rorty, who chronicled his seven-month jour-ney through the United States in Where Life is Better: AnUnsentimental American Journey (1936), hoped to gain hisreader’s trust by pledging to share a “straight story” with hisreaders (273). While committed to telling his readers thetruth—a truth, remember, that many did not want to hear—Rorty also commented on the tenor of the time: “I encoun-

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tered nothing in 15,000 miles of travel that disgusted and ap-palled me so much as this American addiction to makebelieve[sic]. Apparently, not even empty bellies can cure it. Of all thefacts I dug up, none seemed so significant or so dangerous asthe overwhelming fact of our lazy, irresponsible, adolescentinability to face the truth or tell it” (13).1 Rorty’s comments ex-pose the contradiction of the Great Depression: Americanswho simultaneously wanted the truth and craved an escapefrom reality. Understanding its readers’ conundrum, thenewly founded LIFE magazine played off the perceivedmimetic quality of the photograph to document the “truth” ofthe era in a manner that the country could handle.

One of the overriding discussions in the history and criticismof photography is the conception, or misconception, of the realityof the photographic image. While contemporary critics such asRoland Barthes, Alan Sekula, and Susan Sontag emphasize thesubjectivity of the photograph and the photographer, lesserknown are analogous notions discussed by earlier Americancommentators, although in a less theoretical manner. In 1938,critic and arts aficionado Lincoln Kirstein helped the Museum ofModern Art mount the first large exhibition of Walker Evan’sphotographs. Kirstein penned an essay for the exhibition catalogin which he discusses the subjectivity of the camera holder de-spite the camera’s status as a “machine” and the significance ofthe “photographer’s eye,” referring to the camera holder’s “per-sonal vision or unique attitude” (189). He compares the obviousintrusion of the soft-focus photographer, referring to what is nowknown as the pictorialist photographer, to the less obvious intru-sions of the documentary photographer: “The candid-camera isthe greatest liar in the photographic family, shaming the patienthand retoucher as an innocent fibber….with its great pretensionsto accuracy, its promise of sensational truth…[it] presents an in-version of truth, a kind of accidental revelation which does farmore to hide the real fact of what is going on than to explode it”(190). Denying that the camera provides “real testimony,”Kirstein understood that the candid camera “drugs the eye intobelieving it has witnessed a significant fact when it has onlycaught a flicker…The candid camera has little candour. It sensa-tionalizes movements, distorts gesture, and caricatures emo-tion…. [it] obliterates the essential nature of the event it pretendsto discover” (191). In a 1938 article by Beaumont Newhall similar

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ideas were aired: “Journalism has discovered that the camera canoften tell more than thousands of words, and a picture made byphotography implies by its method of production a basis of fact.All know that such an implication is untrue” (Parnassus 3).

Although well-known and respected in art circles, Newhall’sand Kirstein’s ideas were not available to a general public whostill viewed the photograph as essential in its meaning. Fromphotography’s earliest days the medium’s precision was her-alded. Understood as an objective recorder and mirror of reality,the photograph functioned for many as a surrogate to eyewit-nessing an event. Throughout the 1930s numerous books onnews photography written for aspiring photojournalists laudedthe verisimilitude and growing importance of the photograph.Laura Vitray, a veteran newspaperwoman who had worked atMcCall’s, the Washington Post, and the New York EveningGraphic, wrote Pictorial Journalism with two associates in 1939.The trio explained the significance of news photography: “Edi-tors have come to see news pictures, not merely as a means ofsupplementing stories with illustrative ornament but, further,for what they are: the most precise, economical, and effective re-porting of human events that there is” (emphasis in original) (3).President and editor of the New York World-Telegram, Roy W.Howard, penned the introduction to Jack Price’s instructionalbook News Pictures (1937), characterizing the photograph in likefashion: “For many journalistic years the large function of thenewspaper photographer was to furnish ‘art’ to brighten uppages. The news value of the picture—if any—was too fre-quently secondary….that day has passed….America is news pic-ture-conscious, and the alert newspaper publisher is no longerblinking at the undeniable fact. Today the job is not completewhen the editor has said it in type. He must repeat and amplifythe news by saying it with pictures” (xi). Oddly, Vitray also usesthe term “picture-conscious” (6) to describe press associations,while James McCamy describes the success of LIFE and Look—both founded in the 1930s—as related to America’s “picturehunger” (81). America was news picture-conscious, in part be-cause the photograph provides quick and easy access to a story,but also because, as social historian Gisèle Freund explains: “Tothe average man photography, which is the exact reproductionof reality, cannot lie” (149). Price’s vernacular, too, indicates theperception of the news photograph, explaining that the camera-

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man’s “work is restricted to cold realism…. His shots aresketches that he cannot, as the reporter sometimes can, retouchwith a rhetorical stroke. The factual and spot-action nature of hiswork permits him little artistic latitude” (5). It was on these ideasthat LIFE built its publication principles.

Henry Luce started LIFE magazine in the throes of the De-pression; the first issue debuted on 23 November 1936 with Mar-garet Bourke-White’s photograph of the Works ProgressAdministration’s Fort Peck Dam project adorning the cover. Sell-ing out 250,000 newsstand copies in the first day, the magazinewas an immediate success.2 Each week the picture editor re-viewed 20,000 photographs, of which 250 were ultimately pub-lished. Edward Hicks, the magazine’s first picture editor,explained that after the good pictures were chosen, LIFE “willwrite some words to go with them” (qtd. in Wainwright 105). Thatthe visual came first and that pictures drove LIFE’s narrative ismade explicit by Luce’s June 1936 prospectus for the project:

To see life; to see the world; to eyewitness greatevents; to watch the faces of the poor and the ges-tures of the proud; to see strange things—ma-chines, armies, multitudes, shadows in the jungleand on the moon; to see man’s work—his paint-ings, towers and discoveries; to see things thou-sands of miles away, things hidden behind wallsand within rooms, things dangerous to come to;the women that men love and many children; tosee and to take pleasure in seeing; to see and beamazed; to see and be instructed.

Thus to see, and to be shown, is now the willand new expectancy of half mankind.

To see, and to show, is the mission now under-taken by a new kind of publication, The Show-Book ofthe World, hereinafter described.3 (qtd. in Elson 278)

Luce promises his “readers” that the world will be pre-sented to them in a purely visual fashion—he makes no men-tion of reading, only seeing. Through pictures the viewer willsee (notice that he uses this word eleven times), eyewitness, beshown, and watch. The large picture spreads, oversized pages,and high-resolution images all contributed to the photo-

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graphs’ air of authenticity, which supported the reader’s senseof participating as a close observer of America’s stories.

Perhaps for promotional purposes, to legitimize the maga-zine, or to set their pictorial story style apart from more tradi-tional publications, LIFE understood—or at least projected theidea of—the photograph as truthful, factual, and a carrier of coldrealism. This belief suffuses the magazine and its commentary.A two-page statement by LIFE the year The Grapes of Wrath waspublished helps elucidate this point. Touting the magazine as“America’s most potent editorial force,” a May 1939 advertise-ment describes its “picture-and-word editorial technique” that“makes the truth about the world we live in infinitely more excit-ing, more easily absorbed, more alive than it has ever been made be-fore” (emphasis in original) (80–81). The photograph here istruthful and alive, an idea also proclaimed in other Time, Inc.publications. A December 1936 three-page advertisement in For-tune advanced LIFE’s purpose: “LIFE takes for its field not all thenews but all the news which now and hereafter can be seen; andof these events it proposes to be the pictorial record” (italics in origi-nal) (56–58). LIFE wanted us to see the news, and LIFE’s news isthe authority—the magazine proposes to be the pictorial record.This play on the word “record,” a document or account, and“record,” meaning to put down faithfully, simultaneously heraldsthe magazine’s authenticity and correlates this idea with exacttranscription, with truth. More subtly, this idea is found in “AWoman Photographs the Face of a Changing City,” a 1938 articlefeaturing Berenice Abbott’s pictures of New York. The author ofthe text explains that Abbott “set to work making a detached andclear-sighted document of the changing face of New York….Shedoes not care whether her pictures are called art or not. What shedoes care about is using the camera medium as honestly as pos-sible to make for posterity a detailed document of the glory ofAmerican civilization” (40). Abbott’s photographs are seen asdocuments, which she presents to the viewer honestly and in adetached—code for objective—manner.

The way in which LIFE approached the photograph bothshaped and played off the public’s perception of the visualimage. The Photo League, established in New York City in 1936,provided a forum for amateur photographers, and contributionsto the organization’s newsletter Photo Notes are instructive. InAugust 1938, one member of the League wrote: “Upon the pho-

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tographer rests the responsibility and duty of recording a trueimage of the world as it is today” (“For a League” 1). Critic Eliza-beth McCausland lectured at the League, sat on the group’s ad-visory board, and contributed to Photo Notes on more than oneoccasion. She described the photograph’s purpose in like fash-ion: “To state truth, naked, unadorned, is the basic objective ofphotography” (qtd. in Dejardin 161). Dedicated to promulgatingtrue and honest photography, the Photo League promoted non-pictorialist photographs, and classes were offered to this end. Atthe League’s school, courses attempted “to guide the student toa serious and honest approach to photography as a medium andto lead him away from the pictorial and sensational” (“Studentexhibition successful” 2). These views were echoed in LIFE’s let-ters to the editors, or at least in those letters LIFE chose to print(a tactic that may have been employed to reinforce the ideologyof the magazine).C.H. Breuner’s 13September 1937 letterserves as an excellentexample of readerfeedback: “Havingbeen an avid reader ofLIFE from its inception, I have always been pleased, and quitefrequently shocked into reality, at some of the contents of yourmagazine” (10). LIFE’s photographs were undoubtedly a realityvehicle for the public. In the 1930s, photographs were under-stood as purveyors of truth, and LIFE capitalized on that idea.This ceaseless promotion of the camera as truth appears notonly to be the reason that LIFE initially rejected Bristol’s migrantlabor photographs, but also why the magazine ultimately em-braced Bristol’s images as well.

LIFE finally printed a careful selection of Bristol’s photo-graphs at a time when journalism joined in the debate aboutthe truthfulness of Steinbeck’s novel. The magazine initiallyrejected Bristol’s request to do a story on migrant labor be-cause it was not conducive to sales. Bristol remembered thatLIFE “told me quite frankly that a pretty girl on the cover withnot too much clothes on sold an awful lot better than an uglyold woman looking very sad. So I said ‘well, okay, I’ll do a bookon it’” (Bristol CD). Bristol’s comment was very much in linewith LIFE’s creed, of which he was undoubtedly familiar. After

LIFE finally printed a careful selection

of Bristol’s photographs at a time when

journalism joined in the debate about

the truthfulness of Steinbeck’s novel.

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the first twelve issues of LIFE, Luce wrote a memorandum titled“Redefinition.” His comments, focusing on “Charm” and “Relax-ation,” served to define what Luce wanted LIFE to embody:“Charm is the most important quality which LIFE needs whichcannot be extracted from the ordinary processes of journalisticthought. We find that we must definitely plot and plan for Charm.Charm does not come naturally out of the news. And the Charmwhich comes naturally out of the camera is mostly moonlit land-scape stuff which we cannot use. Yet we intend that every issue oflife should have the quality of Charm” (qtd. in Wainwright 91). OfRelaxation, Luce wrote: “All week long a man is harassed and hisbrow is beetled by headlines of the Times or the Daily Mirror…. hestruggles…to understand and grasp the goings-on in this cockeyedworld: and then along comes LIFE and its whole angle on newsand news value is entirely different that he takes a holiday from hisalmost continuous mental preoccupations with the other news-patterns” (qtd. in Wainwright 92).

For Luce, the news of interest was the “goings-on” in theworld, but from a relaxed, yet seductive slant. As Bristol’s mi-grant worker photographs will demonstrate, Luce’s magazinetells us about the Dust Bowl, but in a more entertaining, toned-down manner than the reader would find in traditional newspublications. Luce explains this approach in the same memoran-dum: “To LIFE the sit-down strike is not Labor Problems or BigWords between a dozen men you really don’t give a damn about.In LIFE, the hot news of the sit-down strike is that people sitdown! Or don’t. So simple. So unlike the New York Times. So re-laxing. And yet so true” (qtd. in Wainwright 92). A LIFE adver-tisement from the late thirties, titled “Picture–the NewResponsibility,” promised its readers that they would not be over-whelmed by news of despair, while also reiterating the maga-zine’s philosophy on the reality of the photographic image:

Photographs, the great realists, can distort thetruth by a wanton emphasis on the evil, the cruel,the sensational of life.

LIFE reports the news as it occurs; LIFE can not“protect” its readers from the shuddering truthabout war and disaster. But LIFE shows othertruth, the quieter truth from which the news head-line violently erupts.

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LIFE’s mind-guided cameras have gone forthacross the vast face of America and pictured its nor-mal, pleasant expressions–its college life and small-town folkways, its wheat-ripening in the sun, and itsresearch proceeding patiently in busy laboratories.

Out of LIFE’s resolve to make pictures respon-sible—as well as powerful—LIFE’s editors havemade a tremendous discovery: that millions ofpeople can be deeply interested in pictures of calm,daily life as in pictures of the accidental, the sud-den, the explosive which makes the news.

By showing these simple stories side by sidewith its news-picture stories, by maintaining thegood balance between the extraordinary and the or-dinary, LIFE meets its obligation to show–not anyone aspect of life–but life. (qtd. in Vitray, Mills, andEllard 355–56)

Nevertheless, LIFE did protect its readers, or at least pre-sented them with another kind of wanton emphasis—an em-phasis on an America not suffering greatly, an America not inthe midst of an economic depression. In a sad and extraordinarytime, LIFE gained many readers by promising truth, happiness,and the ordinary. These nuanced truths were conveyed throughcarefully chosen photographs and the words that accompaniedthem. Small manipulations, in essence a calming propaganda,were the ultimate result of LIFE’s desire to promote sales. Luceand his staff had an excellent grasp on the pulse of America. Thecountry simultaneously wanted to know the facts yet tried to es-cape them. Other organizations, not LIFE, could be the bearer ofbad news, such as the Farm Security Administration.

The Resettlement Administration (RA)—more popularlyknown as the Farm Security Administration (FSA) eventhough the organization was not officially titled as such until1937—was created by President Roosevelt to assist poor Mid-western American farmers and migrants. Roy Stryker, chief ofthe Historical Section, hired Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, andmany other photographers to document the plight of desper-ate rural refugees. The photographs were intended to educateand inform the country of the poverty and desperation in DustBowl America. With facts documented by the camera, the pho-

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tographs were taken to prove that federal funds were needed toassist fellow Americans and that the government’s New Dealprograms were justified. These official documents were madeavailable to myriad publications at minimal cost, ultimately ap-pearing in nationally syndicated news forums. FSA photo-graphs found their way into innumerable books, pamphlets,and articles, and a magazine like LIFE that catered to a softerpublic would have viewed such pictures as too agonizing for acountry already inundated with Dust Bowl imagery. The publichad enough of breadlines, droughts, soup kitchens, andsqualor. Thus, only when Bristol’s photographs could be pre-sented not as gritty social realism but instead as portraits sug-gesting a clever human-interest story would LIFE publish them.Bristol’s photographs were printed in essays about the DustBowl that downplayed the misery. His photographs were used togently inform; in essence they still maintained their documen-tary function, for they proved the truth of Steinbeck’s story.

LIFE’s June essay that included Bristol’s photographs, “TheGrapes of Wrath: John Steinbeck writes a major novel about west-ern migrants,” explains that “The pictures on this page are notsimply types which resemble those described in The Grapes ofWrath. They are the people of whom Author Steinbeck wrote. Be-fore starting his book, he lived in California’s migratory laborcamps. LIFE Photographer Horace Bristol accompanied him.The woman on the left-hand page might well be Ma Joad, AuthorSteinbeck’s heroine. The man with the double-edged ax is a coun-terpart of his hero, Tom Joad” (67). Such commentaries rein-forced many of the same notions of truth expressed in reviews ofthe novel. Recall, too, that words taken directly from the novel ac-companied Bristol’s photographs. Underneath Bristol’s photo-graph of Ma Joad’s counterpart, we find dialogue that Ma spokein the novel: “I always kept ‘em together and kept ‘em fed. Iplanned for em’. I can buy this house for ten dollars. I’ll have agarden along there. Ducks can swim in the irrigation ditch. I gotto get ten dollars” (67). Through Bristol’s photographs LIFEplayed on the public misunderstanding of Steinbeck’s fictionalJoads as real-life Oklahoma migrants.

Likewise, the “Speaking of Pictures” article, a rebuttal tonegative reviews of Ford’s film, compared Bristol’s photo-graphs with the film stills and employed captions to reinforcethe similarity between the actor and the “Joad family member”

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depicted. The caption accompanying “Ma Joad’s” picturereads: “Troubled mother of a large family of migrant Okla-homa sharecroppers, this woman was found by Author JohnSteinbeck and Photographer Bristol in a California fruit-pick-ers’ camp. Her great yearning was to keep her harassed familytogether, to buy for $10 the flimsy shack before which sheposed. She is the perfect prototype of Ma Joad, the heroicmother in The Grapes of Wrath, acted in the movie by Jane Dar-well” (10). Prototype means model, which the figure in Bris-tol’s photograph was for Twentieth Century-Fox, but prototypeis also defined as original, which by association means real.The implication of originality, or real/truth, was connotedagain in Bristol’s picture of a migrant family standing aroundtheir worn-down jalopy accompanied by a movie still of theJoads with their beat-up car (Fig. 4). The caption here reads:“A battered jalopy is home for this wandering family, just ar-rived in a California pea-picking camp, where, handbills toldthem, ‘they’s good wages.’ Below, in an equally battered car,the movie Joads pull out of a West Coast Hooverville.” Thecaption notes that the still is of the “movie” Joads, implyingthat Bristol’s “Joads” are the real-life Joads. This insinuation ismade more explicit in the final sentence of the caption: “Ifanything, Zanuck’s Okies are somewhat better equipped, bet-ter dressed than the originals” (10).

Bristol’s photo essays were published when the migrantmisery was still very much an issue in California and through-out the Southwest; but a 1939 headline from the “Speaking ofPictures” issue read: “A special issue of LIFE shows some ofthe things which are right about America.” On the near an-niversary of Black Tuesday, 29 October 1929, the day the stockmarket crashed, LIFE took “stock of some of the abidingthings that are magnificently right about America,” as a con-trast to the “ten years America’s headline-making news hasbeen mostly bad.” LIFE pointed out that amid stories of“heartaches and headaches, of depression and deficits,” read-ers should be reminded of a “richer and happier” America.Moreover, LIFE advises its readers, “Even America’s bad head-lines looked good beside the headlines which continued tocome last week from the rest of the world,” noting Italy andGermany’s war pact, Russia’s increased arms outlay, andJapanese bombings, among many others (24). This celebra-

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tion of America came complete with a cover photograph of theStatue of Liberty standing tall in all her glory.

Similar softening of the documentary impact of Bristol’sphotos occurred in “Speaking of Pictures”: “These photo-graphs, here republished, were taken by LIFE photographerHorace Bristol in March 1938, when he and author Steinbecktoured the Okie camps in search of a picture book and story forLIFE. The picture book was dropped to make way for a best-selling novel called The Grapes of Wrath” (11).The text con-

Figure 4. “A BatteredJalopy.” Detail from

“Speaking of Pictures…These byLife Prove Facts in

‘Grapes of Wrath,’”LIFE 8, no. 8 (19 Feb-ruary 1940). LIFE ©1940 Time Inc. Used

with Permission.

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cludes with one of the quotes with which I introduce thisessay: “Never before had the facts behind so great a work of fic-tion been researched by the newscamera.” The newscamera,or the photograph, is the compelling factor for LIFE—in otherwords, the carrier of truth. Capitalizing on Bristol’s affiliationwith Steinbeck, avoiding despair, and also contributing to thenotion that the Joads were actual people and that The Grapes ofWrath’s account was factual, LIFE proffers the Joad family tothe reader. With the double entendre—in capital letters—these by life, the magazine discloses an understanding of thephotograph as the most truthful of media: the carefullysculpted truth that LIFE wished to dispense to America.

LIFE was keenly aware that America was an emotionally ex-hausted nation inundated with migrant photographs from theFSA and overwhelmed by New Deal propaganda. For LIFE theDepression needed to be acknowledged but in a less severe formthan mainstream publications, like the more hard-hitting Fortune.In the same month that The Grapes of Wrath was released, Fortunepublished an article on the Dust Bowl. Issued before the book’sformal publication and the accompanying pictorial essay in LIFE,“John Steinbeck writes a major novel about Western Migrants,”Fortune’s article bore the less catchy title “I Wonder Where WeCan Go Now,” and was subtitled “A million-odd workers and theirfamilies ask, and nobody has the answer. Underemployed, under-fed, they are a national problem—most crucial in California” (90).Accompanying the informative eleven-page article, which in thetable of contents is identified by the headline “Migratory Labor: ASocial Problem,” are eight watercolors by Millard Sheets. The fea-ture includes an excerpt from a 1936 State Relief Administrationof California report (Division of Special Surveys and Studies), nu-merous statistics and information chronicling the migrant’splight, a map showing patterns of migration, and a discussion ofthe mechanization of farming. Following the article is a five-pageaddendum titled “Along the Road: Extracts from a Reporter’sNotebook,” which includes 24 photographs by Horace Bristol andDorothea Lange. The reporter describes the squalid conditions,noting that several cases of typhoid were diagnosed during hisfour months of investigation, the workers’ poor diet, and the lowwages (97–100). The article concludes with a quote from a resi-dent of the camp, retaining the native inflection of his subject:

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People has kept comin’ in here so now there’s sixfor every job—and darn few jobs. See that sign? Saysforty-five cents for picking 100 pounds o’ cotton.Know how long it takes to pick 100 pounds o’ cottondown here? Well, it takes about a whole day. Youknow you can’t feed a family o’ six on forty-five centsa day. It ain’t my fault, is it? Jees, I worked hard sinceI was a kid. I allus done what I thought was right,and I think I know right from wrong. I allus tried toteach my kids right from wrong. But I’m beginnin’to wonder. I don’t know what to do. There’s nothingback in Oklahoma for us to go to and now there’snothin’ here. Somehow somethin’ don’t seemright—I want to work and I can’t—I want to bringup my kids decent. You been to college, Mister,maybe you can explain it to me. (100)

This vernacular is akin to that spoken by Steinbeck’s Joad fam-ily, which further, to use LIFE’s nomenclature, “Prove Facts in‘Grapes of Wrath,’” a point made especially potent because thearticle was published before Steinbeck’s book. The author evenprovided a Steinbeckian frame of reference for the reader in theintroduction to the main article, noting that the workers de-scribed are “the itinerant agricultural laborers about whom JohnSteinbeck wrote his Of Mice and Men and In Dubious Battle” (91).

The polarity of Fortune’s detailed, investigative article toLIFE’s Bristol articles demonstrates the differing objectives ofTime Inc.’s magazines, a disparity made more lucid by an ex-amination of the most extensive discourse on the Dust Bowlpublished by LIFE. On 21 June 1937, LIFE printed a six-page pic-torial essay on the Dust Bowl, with one photograph by DorotheaLange, four reproductions of paintings by Alexandre Hogue,and fourteen photographs by an unknown cameraman. Thephoto-essay put a decidedly LIFE “spin” on the matter, avoidingthe more disturbing facts later detailed in Steinbeck’s novel anddiscussed in Fortune. Typically, the text is short, and most pagesare devoted to the images. While the article presents some in-formation on the Dust Bowl, it focuses more on Hogue’s paint-ings, labeling him the “artist of the U.S. Dust Bowl” (“U.S. DustBowl” 61). Four of Hogue’s geometrically patterned, dark-huedpaintings, three of the drought and one self-portrait, cover two

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pages. The author notes that Hogue “hopes to produce a ‘super-realism’ that will make the observer not only see the Dust Bowl,but also feel its heat, its despair, its anguished death, the tragedyof its farmers” (61). This dramatic hyperbole contrasts with themore staid, researched piece in Fortune.

A comparable strategy was taken with some of the fifteenpictures that follow LIFE’s spread on Hogue. FollowingLange’s portrait of an elderly Okie man and the anonymousphotographs of standard Dust Bowl fare (showing migrants ina run down car and at work) are eight photographs chartingthe progression of a dust storm. This thrilling scene, whichdistracts the viewer from the more serious news pictures, isdescribed by LIFE sensationally: “On this page you see stills ofthe best dust-storm motion picture ever taken” (63).

Only one of Bristol’s Fortune photographs is the same asone ultimately used by LIFE in its three The Grapes of Wrathessays, although clearly the camp depicted in Fortune is theVisalia locale that Bristol and Steinbeck visited. Many of theVisalia migrants appeared in Fortune; one of the stills is a vari-ation of the famed “Ma Joad” picture standing before the clap-board house. Here Bristol’s pictures simply provide visualaccompaniment to an article that objectively describes the con-ditions of migrant life. In Fortune’s article, photography doesnot function as charming entertainment as it did in LIFE, nordoes the magazine create a false construct for Bristol’s mi-grant worker imagery. Thus, it could be argued that “that cap-italist magazine” more cogently proves the facts in Steinbeck’snovel than did LIFE.

LIFE’s presentation of Bristol’s migrant worker photo-graphs was one of many tactics used to report the sadness ofthe Depression in an unobtrusive fashion. A 15 February 1937issue of LIFE included a pictorial essay on a flood in the OhioValley, “The Flood Leaves its Victims on the Bread Line.”4 Thefirst page shows a nearly full-page photograph by Bourke-White of a somber group of black men and women waiting forfood in front of a National Association of Manufacturers’ bill-board depicting a well-fed, white family driving in their car(Fig. 5). The smiling middle-class family, complete with twochildren—one male, one female—and a dog hanging out ofthe window, is surrounded by the slogans, “World’s HighestStandard of Living” and “There’s No Way Like the American

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Way.” Other photographs include a picture of women and ba-bies sleeping “snugly on Army blankets” (10), and an image ofa smiling chain gang providing emergency relief (12). Akin toBourke-White, the author of the article reveals the subjectguilefully and with a bit of avoidance. The Depression is notmentioned at all, only the issues caused by the flood. AlthoughLIFE did report “the news as it occurs” as the magazine prom-ised its readers, and asserted that it “can not ‘protect’ its read-ers from the shuddering truth about war and disaster,” themagazine also brushed over the desperate side of the flood inthe Ohio Valley, or maybe even “distorted the truth” by blatantomission. Unlike the FSA photos purposefully used to effectchange, LIFE’s photographs and stories assiduously avoidedthe larger picture, especially if it was a painful one.

What Luce and the editors of LIFE ultimately did—at leastprior to the Second World War—was present a relatively safe,secure America, while showing the more stressful news in therest of the world. By comparison, the United States’ problemspaled. Take LIFE’s coverage of the conflicts leading up to theSino-Japanese War (1937–1945). A 28 December 1936 photo-essay titled “The Cruel Chinese” covered the December 12 SianIncident, the kidnapping of Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek.These horrifying photographs show the execution of a ChineseCommunist and the beheading of another figure in front of on-lookers. While this was certainly news, these lurid photographsoverstep the bounds of decorum but also accomplish a twofoldgoal. By printing such pictures, LIFE’s integrity was salvaged.The magazine provided serious coverage, and thus Americacould credibly be shown as not a nation in distress, such asChina and by the early forties, Germany, but a democratic soci-ety, in the right and on the right track, prepared to emerge fromthe economic downfall of the Depression.

My goal in this essay has not been to suggest that Bristol’sphotographs were influential on Steinbeck’s conception of hisclassic novel. A few authors have made this point, albeitbriefly, and I disagree with that assessment (e.g., Howarth).5

Steinbeck’s journey with Bristol to the Central Valley was justone of his many research excursions. The author’s publica-tions on migrant workers before the trip were substantial, andall of these explorations of migrant life contributed to Stein-beck’s vision of the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath, the novel he

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began writing in December 1936, nearly a year before the pairtraveled together. Bristol’s photographs may have strength-ened Steinbeck’s visual perceptions of migrant life, and Stein-beck’s easy manner with the workers made them morecomfortable in the presence of a photographer (Bristol to Kel-ley 68), but the pair’s alliance ultimately presents somethingother than a collaborative effort between two artists. Rather,Bristol’s migrant worker photographs tell a story about truth,LIFE magazine, and America’s crisis of trust as well as eco-nomics. Indeed, LIFE’s picture philosophy, one of photo-graphic truth and relaxed, charming entertainment—idealsconceived during the trials of the great Depression—is the no-tion that doomed, and then redeemed, Bristol’s enterprise.

EpilogueWith the celebrations associated with the fiftieth anniversary

of The Grapes of Wrath’s release, Bristol granted several inter-views. In publications as diverse as People magazine, AmericanPhotographer, and The Californians, Bristol explained his associa-tion with Steinbeck, attempting to set the record straight about

Figure 5. “The FloodLeaves its Victims onthe Bread Line” LIFE2, no. 7 (15 February1937). LIFE © 1937Time Inc. Used with Permission.

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their working relationship (Bristol to Kelley; Roberts; Bristol Cal-ifornians). Bristol consistently related much of the story explainedin this essay, remaining relatively neutral about Steinbeck’s de-ception. In the 1990 oral interview relied on for this article,though, Bristol’s understandable animosity showed: “Steinbeckwas a very secretive individual. He also was, for lack of anotherterm, a user…. I have to think about my words because it’s not tooeasy. He got rid of Carol by divorce ultimately. He never saw TomCollins again….The problem was Horace Bristol. What does he[Steinbeck] do about him?” (Bristol CD).

John Steinbeck never discussed his collaboration with Bris-tol in his letters, nor is Bristol mentioned in Steinbeck’s now-published diary, Working Days: The Journals of the Grapes ofWrath, 1938–1941, kept during the years surrounding thebook’s creation. The only reference to Bristol, although not byname, is in a 7 March 1938 letter from Steinbeck to his literaryagent about his research in “the field”: “LIFE sent me downwith a photographer from its staff and we took a lot of picturesof the people” (Letters 161). Not only does Steinbeck refrainfrom specifically mentioning Bristol, but also he erroneouslynotes that their journey was an assignment from LIFE eventhough, according to Bristol, the author knew the pair plannedto create a full-length photo-essay. This course of events tendsto validate autobiographer Jackson Benson’s assertion thatSteinbeck “detested collaborations” and Bristol’s first-handobservation that Steinbeck “wanted to feel that anything he didwas his, and nobody else had any influence on it” (Benson 347;Bristol to Kelley 73). As Bristol recalled in the SteinbeckNewsletter: “Later, when Steinbeck’s letters were published, Idid feel that he was less than generous, or even honest, in fail-ing to credit the fact that I had first suggested a book on thesubject, and we had indeed worked on it over a period of sev-eral months [emphasis added]. I learned, however, that thiswas not the first time this had happened with Steinbeck” (6).Perhaps, though, Steinbeck’s omission of Bristol was not asinsidious as the photographer believed. Maybe Steinbeck wasnot deliberately dishonest, and instead simply became so over-whelmed by the monumental task of writing The Grapes ofWrath that Bristol faded into distant memory.

While Bristol’s name is largely erased from the history ofThe Grapes of Wrath, his photographs ultimately have become

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associated with the book. LIFE’s presentation of Bristol’s pho-tographs printed with, “some words to go with them,” has hadlong term implications, in part due to the photographer’s ef-forts. In the end, Bristol understood his prints—or perhapslinked his photographs with Steinbeck’s novel to augment theirvalue—to be of the “original” Joads. By the fiftieth anniversaryof book’s publication, Bristol had renamed his Visalia photo-graphs as “The Grapes of Wrath” portfolio, or series. Thus, a pic-ture of an elderly man is titled Grandpa Joad, from “‘The Grapesof Wrath Series,’ 1938,” and so forth for all the characters andscenes from the book for which Bristol had appropriate photo-graphs. Among these images is a print of a woman breast feed-ing her child, titled Rose of Sharon, after Steinbeck’s fictionaleldest Joad daughter (Fig. 6). Bristol’s pictures of anonymousmigrant workers permanently transmogrified into pictures ofthe Joads in 1995 when the Georgia Museum of Art mountedthe exhibition “Stories from Life: The Photography of HoraceBristol,” which included several images from “The Grapes ofWrath Series.” In a catalog essay, museum director William U.Eiland explains this metamorphosis: “Bristol is so respectful ofSteinbeck’s work that he uses the names of characters in thenovel to identify his pictures” (22).

Eiland’s explanation seems a bit simplistic, as Bristol, whilecalling the novel “a great book,” also took issue with the story(Bristol CD). Bristol remembered discussing The Grapes ofWrath with Steinbeck, at which time Bristol told the author“how wonderful I thought it [The Grapes of Wrath] was,” but that“I feel rather sorry to have you use that last episode of thewoman nursing the dying man based on my photographs…. It isone of the best photographs I ever took.… I said, you know, bothof us at the time thought of her as being a Madonna-typewhereas what he made her was sort of an earth mother givingsustenance to the dying man. He [Steinbeck] didn’t like that atall. He was very annoyed with my criticism” (Bristol CD). Bristolrefers to an episode at the climax of the book, where Rose ofSharon, who has given birth to a stillborn baby, offers her milk-filled breast to a starving old man. This final scene crystallizesone of the major themes of the novel. Here Steinbeck shows thatthe Joads have moved away from the common American doc-trine of individualism, and instead see participation in Ameri-can culture as less about self-interest (as opposed to the

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capitalist landowners) and more about working as a collective toachieve good for all (a notable contrast is that while Steinbeck’sJoad family moved away from self-involved individualism to asense of fellowship and giving with those around them, the au-thor’s relationship with Bristol shows that Steinbeck himselfnever did). The Rose of Sharon scene was one that offendedmany readers, leading to the charges of obscenity. Bristol did notlike the episode for this reason: “I felt it was done really to shockand titillate the 1937 [sic] audience….It didn’t shock me but itmade me really unhappy” (Bristol CD). Interactions between Bris-

Figure 6. HoraceBristol, Rose of

Sharon, 1938. From“The Grapes of

Wrath.” © HoraceBristol. Courtesy of

the Estate of HoraceBristol & Katrina Do-

erner Photographs,Brooklyn, NY.

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tol and Steinbeck such as the one recounted above led the photog-rapher to observe that there was a “lack of sympathy between us.Not hostility, but lack of sympathy….Steinbeck didn’t really wantthem [the photographs] to be competitive with his book…. I don’tthink he wanted them” (Bristol CD). Despite this conflict, the sev-enteen pictures from “The Grapes of Wrath Series” reproducedfor the Georgia Museum of Art exhibition catalog—with whichBristol was heavily involved—were all captioned as from the se-ries. Subsequently, Bristol’s photographs of the “Joads” have be-come so allied with The Grapes of Wrath that the cover of the 1998Penguin edition of the novel bears a cropped version of one ofBristol’s Tom Joad portraits (Fig. 7). Bristol, I think, while showingrespect for Steinbeck’s book, took the position—to use that oldaxiom—“if you can’t beat them, join them.”

In July 1938, soon after Bristol and Steinbeck finished theirweekend trips to the Central Valley, the author received a letterfrom Ohio University English professor C.N. Mackinnon, sent onbehalf of Merle Danford, one of his Master’s degree students. Thestudent planned to write her thesis on the author and hoped tomeet with Steinbeck, for which Mackinnon’s letter was an inter-mediary. Steinbeck replied to Mackinnon: “Let your youngwoman write, but let her beware. I’ll lie—not because I want to lie,but because I can’t remember what is true and what isn’t. I’m rea-sonably sure that my biography, particularly when it is autobiog-raphy, is the worst pack of lies in the world. And the awful thing isthat I don’t know which are lies and which aren’t. Compensationmaybe, I don’t know. It’s so bad that my wife, who is a truthful per-son, really likes the truth I mean and puts some store in it, is allconfused too…. I’m not trying to be funny—this is a tragic truth”(Danford 8). Truth resurfaces again, and tragic truth at that. Thetruth is that Horace Bristol’s photographs were used to promotethe ideology of LIFE magazine and not given serious considera-tion as documentary material. The truth is that Steinbeck—whosemigrant worker novel ultimately won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize,served as the cornerstone of his 1962 Nobel Prize, and has soldmore than 14 million copies—never gave Bristol credit wherecredit is due. The truth is that truth is the most slippery of ideasand for Depression-era Americans the only truth they knew wasthat life/LIFE would somehow go on.

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Figure 7. The Grapesof Wrath by John

Steinbeck © 1939,renewed © 1967 by

John Steinbeck. Usedby permission of

Viking Penguin, a divi-sion of Penguin

Group (USA) Inc.

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N OT E S

1 William Stott brilliantly shows that a “documentary imagination” arose in the

thirties. As do I, Stott argues that the information gap led to a distrust that was

only alleviated by eyewitness accounts or approximations thereof (67–73).2 Jackson Edwards’s contemporaneous article, “One Every Minute,” discusses

the popularity of picture magazines at the time.3 A footnote to the prospectus explained that the “Actual name will appear on

Vol. I, No. 1.” For more on LIFE, see all three volumes of Elson’s history and

Wainwright’s indispensable book. Erika Doss’ edited volume, Looking at

LIFE Magazine, includes several excellent critical essays on the magazine.4 Two pictorial essays on the flood, more serious in tone, ran in the previous

week’s issue. See “America’s Worst Flood Makes Nearly a Million

Refugees,” and “Faces in the Flood.”5 Cynthia Weber Farah, the woman who conducted the oral interview on

which I rely for this article, wrote a Master’s thesis that looks at connec-

tions between Dorthea Lange and Horace Bristol’s photographs and The

Grapes of Wrath. Farah, too, does not believe that Bristol’s pictures signifi-

cantly influenced Steinbeck (“The Interactive Relationship”).

WO R K S C I T E D

Advertisement. Fortune 14, no. 6 (December 1936): 56–58.

Advertisement. LIFE 6, no. 20 (May 15, 1939): 80–81.

“Along the Road: Extracts from a Reporter’s Notebook.” Fortune 19, no. 4

(April 1939): 97–100.

“America’s Worst Flood Makes Nearly a Million Refugees.” LIFE 2, no. 6

(February 8, 1937): 9–23.

Benson, Jackson. The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer. New York:

Viking, 1984.

“Bestsellers Here and Elsewhere.” New York Times (May 13, 1935): 13.

Boren, Lyle H. Congressional Record. 76th Congress, 3d Session, pt. 13, 86

(1940): 139–140.

Breuner, C. H. Letter to the Editor. LIFE 3, no. 11 (September 13, 1937): 10.

Bristol, Horace. Interview with Cynthia Weber Farah. Compact disc (in possession

of the Martha Heasley Cox Steinbeck Research Center). 1 April 1990.———, as told to Jack Kelley. “Travels with Steinbeck.” People 31, no. 17 (May

1, 1989): 67–73

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———. “John Steinbeck and ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’” Steinbeck Newsletter 2,

no. 1 (Fall 1988): 6–8.———. “Documenting The Grapes of Wrath.” The Californians (Jan-Feb.

1988): 40–47.

“The Cruel Chinese.” LIFE 1, no. 6 (December 28, 1936): 50–51.

Danford, Merle. “A Critical Survey of John Steinbeck: His Life and the Devel-

opment of His Writings.” MA thesis. Ohio U, 1939.

Davis, Elmer. “The New Deal’s Uses of Publicity.” New York Times Book Re-

view (May 19, 1935): 5, 17.

Dejardin, Fiona M. “The Photo League: Left-wing Politics and the Popular

Press.” History of Photography 18, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 159–173.

Donohue, Agnes McNeill, ed. A Casebook on “The Grapes of Wrath.” New York:

Cromwell, 1968.

Doss, Erika, ed. Looking at LIFE Magazine. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian

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Modern Art, 1938.

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Samantha Baskind is Assistant Professor of Art History at Cleveland State Uni-

versity. She is the author of Raphael Soyer and the Search for Modern Jewish Art

(2004). Her current book project, titled "Telling Tales and Finding Redemption in

Twentieth-Century American Art," looks at the nexus between the visual and the

narrative in the work of five artists: Howard Chandler Christy, Alexander Kruse,

Jack Levine, Larry Rivers, and Horace Bristol.

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