Burned Books, FBI Surveillance, and a Nobel Prize: What Steinbeck’s Story Reveals About America Today
The FBI watched him for more than 40 years. His books were burned in public. He got death threats. He was even blocked from serving in his own country’s army. His only crime: he wrote a novel about poor people and made his readers feel for them.
Today we want to tell you about a writer we love at NovaFuture. One of those writers we count as monuments of literature. So we figured it was worth introducing you to him if you don’t know him yet. And rediscovering him if you already do. Especially if you’re European, because he’s oddly still pretty unknown on that side of the Atlantic.
We’re talking about none other than the towering John Steinbeck. An American born in 1902, dead in 1968. Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. And yet, for all his international fame, his own country spent decades trying to shut him up. His story is fascinating because it isn’t only about literature. It’s about power, censorship, political repression and what actually happens when somebody dares to tell the truth about a country that would rather keep it hidden. You’ll see that this man’s life explains something essential about America, then and now. Something Hollywood soft power and Netflix series have always worked hard to cover up.
Because with MAGA in power, everybody’s acting like they can’t believe it, wondering if the USA turned fascist overnight. Steinbeck’s story proves the exact opposite. This country supposedly blessed by some hypothetical god has always treated anyone who dared show its real face as an enemy. MAGA invented nothing. They just took the mask off.
The streets made this writer, not books
John Ernst Steinbeck was born February 27, 1902, in Salinas, a small farm town in California tucked into a fertile valley a few miles from the Pacific. His mother taught school and gave him a taste for reading and writing early on. His father ran a small flour mill and eventually went bankrupt. Watching the family fall marked the young Steinbeck deeply. It left him raw and wide open toward people who lose everything. Toward the ones the system grinds up without even noticing. But Steinbeck didn’t learn to tell the world’s story in a library.
He went to Stanford and didn’t stay long. He bounced between lecture halls and the fields, working as a farmhand and a laborer on California ranches. Those jobs put him shoulder to shoulder with the migrant workers pouring into the Salinas Valley. Those men and women nobody looked at became his material. So he never finished his degree.
In 1925 he tried his luck in New York as a freelance writer. Total flop. He came back to California dead broke and moved into a cottage off by itself on the coast. He wrote from there. He also struggled. He published several books that went nowhere. For almost ten years nobody cared what he had to say.
Then in 1935 a comic novel of his called Tortilla Flat finally hit. But Steinbeck had zero interest in being an entertainer. He cared about the people at the bottom, the invisible ones, the ones the American dream had dumped by the side of the road. That’s probably what pushed him to hang around union organizers and spend time with strikers from the canneries and the farms. Around the same time he made friends with left-wing activists like the writer Lincoln Steffens and the sculptor Francis Whitaker. His first wife, Carol, pulled him deeper into the radical circles of 1930s California.
Anyway, you get the picture. Steinbeck wasn’t a salon intellectual theorizing about poverty from a comfortable desk. He was a guy who had slept in migrant camps, shared their meals and seen with his own eyes what America was doing to its most vulnerable children. And that’s exactly what made him dangerous in the eyes of the powerful.
The Grapes of Wrath, the book that shook America
Before the book that changed his life, Steinbeck had already laid the groundwork for what made him singular. In 1936 he put out In Dubious Battle, a strike novel that told the fight of California’s farm workers against the big landowners from the inside. The next year, Of Mice and Men brought him wider recognition with that gutting story of two itinerant workers held together by an unlikely friendship in a world that had no room for them. Steinbeck wrote about small people like nobody else did back then. But the best was still coming.
To get ready for his big one, he took an assignment from the San Francisco News that sent him into the migrant camps of California’s Central Valley. That seven-part series, published as The Harvest Gypsies, let him document living conditions that were beyond appalling. He met whole families who had lost everything, driven out of Oklahoma and the Great Plains by drought, dust storms and foreclosure. These people were starving to death by the side of California roads while the big growers got rich off them. He came back shaken and furious. He wrote in his journal at the time: “I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this.”
That healthy rage produced The Grapes of Wrath, published in April 1939. The novel follows the Joad family, Oklahoma farmers forced onto the road to California with nothing but an old truck and the hope of something better. What they find when they get there is the opposite of the American dream. Exploitation, poverty, contempt and organized violence, run by the people who own the land against the people who work it.
The success was immediate and massive! The book sold 430,000 copies in a few months and became the number one bestseller of 1939. It won the Pulitzer in 1940 and Eleanor Roosevelt herself defended it publicly in her daily column. In 1940 John Ford turned it into an unforgettable movie with Henry Fonda as Tom Joad. And Woody Guthrie, a total unknown back then, got discovered at a benefit concert for farm workers inspired by the novel. He got his album Dust Bowl Ballads out of it, and that album made him famous.
But this book didn’t just move people, and that’s what makes it exceptional. It changed things for real. The Grapes of Wrath triggered congressional hearings on how migrant workers were living and led directly to new laws protecting them. The Library of Congress counts it today as one of the very few novels in American history that produced actual legislation. And the powerful went after the author precisely because the book hit that hard.
The grinder started up
The capitalists didn’t wait long. Within weeks of publication, a full campaign to destroy Steinbeck and his book got organized.
The first dirty blow came out of California, from Kern County. No accident there, since Kern County is exactly where the Joads land at the end of the novel. The big local landowners took it personally, and they were right to. So in August 1939 the county board of supervisors voted four to one to ban the book outright from every library and every school in the county. The resolution came from one Stanley Abel, a former Ku Klux Klan member, at the direct request of the Associated Farmers, a powerful consortium of big landowners who fought any form of union organizing tooth and nail.
But the ban wasn’t enough for them! Bill Camp, a cotton magnate who ran the Associated Farmers locally, wanted to make a statement. So he staged a book burning in downtown Bakersfield in front of photographers. And for the occasion he recruited one of his own workers, a guy named Clell Pruett, to light the match. The killer detail is that Pruett had never read The Grapes of Wrath. He’d just heard a radio show about it and it made him mad. Years later, when a reporter finally got him to read the novel, Pruett said he regretted nothing. The photo of that burning ran in Look magazine and went around the country.
Sadly, it didn’t stop at California. In East St. Louis, Illinois, five of the nine public library board members voted to burn the three copies they owned. The vote got reversed after the national scandal it kicked up. But the damage was done! The book was also banned from libraries in Kansas City, Buffalo, Anniston, Alabama and several other cities around the country.
It even reached the floor of Congress. Oklahoma congressman Lyle Boren stood up in front of his colleagues to trash the novel in terms of unbelievable violence. His words went into the Congressional Record for posterity: “I arise to say to you, my colleagues, and to 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 twisted, distorted mind.” Tell us how you really feel!
Steinbeck didn’t fold under that flood of hate, but it got to him. The Associated Farmers ran a systematic smear campaign against him, in the press and by word of mouth. He summed the whole thing up in a letter with chilling clarity:
“The Associated Farmers have begun an hysterical personal attack on me both in the papers and a whispering campaign. I’m a Jew, a pervert, a drunk, a dope fiend.”
He got mountains of hate mail and death threats. He wrote to his literary agent that they wouldn’t kill him, he thought, but they’d destroy him if and when they could. He stopped going out alone and took security precautions on the advice of people who, in his own words, “knew the ropes.” He went as far as handing compromising information to the FBI, as life insurance in case he ever had “an accident.”
“People always do wrong when they’re too happy.” Steinbeck knew what he was talking about.
The Kern County librarian, a brave woman named Gretchen Knief, fought to get the ban lifted at the risk of her job. She wrote the supervisors a letter that’s still famous, where she said: “It’s such a vicious and dangerous thing to begin. Besides, banning books is so utterly hopeless and futile. Ideas don’t die because a book is forbidden reading.” The ban came off in January 1941, a year and a half after the vote. And in a pretty pathetic twist, the people who imposed it claimed they’d only banned the book to publicize it and help Steinbeck spread his message.
The FBI, or the art of tailing an innocent writer for 40 years
The hate campaign from the landowners and the politicians was violent, but it stayed predictable enough. Rich people going after somebody who exposes what they do is old as dirt! What happened to Steinbeck next is a whole other level. Because this time the state itself came after him. And not just any branch of it: the Federal Bureau of Investigation, run with an iron fist by the fearsome J. Edgar Hoover.
Hoover was a category of his own in American history. Named FBI director in 1935, he’d built up over the years a real obsession with anything that even faintly resembled communism, socialism or just plain sympathy for working people. With secret authorization from President Roosevelt, who gave him a blank check on domestic surveillance, Hoover had woven a huge domestic intelligence net. And Steinbeck checked every box that made a man suspect in the eyes of the FBI boss. He had German roots. He hung around union men. The communist press had praised his books. And above all, he’d written a novel that made poor people want to revolt. Plenty enough to count him as an enemy.
By the early 1940s the FBI had opened a file on Steinbeck and never closed it again. Federal agents intercepted his mail, tracked his movements down to his trips to the Mexican border, carefully logged who he saw and listed his subscriptions to papers they judged subversive. His second wife registering to vote as a communist one day went straight into the file. Even his personal friendships got recorded and analyzed.
The most twisted move came in 1942, right after the US entered the war. Steinbeck, a sincere patriot, wanted to enlist and applied for an officer’s commission. The field agent assigned to vet him concluded the writer had all the honesty, loyalty and integrity you’d need to serve in the armed forces. Military intelligence, under Hoover’s direct influence, simply overrode that recommendation. So John Steinbeck, Pulitzer winner, author of the most widely read novel in America, was denied the right to serve his own country. Not because he was unfit. Because he’d written a book that bothered the powerful.
Steinbeck knew exactly what was going on. He could feel the agents behind him and he’d had enough. In 1942 he sent a letter to Attorney General Francis Biddle, Hoover’s boss, and he didn’t mince words:
“Do you suppose you could ask Edgar’s boys to stop stepping on my heels? They think I am an enemy alien. It is getting tiresome.”
Hoover’s answer to Biddle was a masterpiece of bureaucratic hypocrisy: “I wish to advise that Steinbeck is not being and has never been investigated by this Bureau. His letter is returned to you herewith.” A flat lie, as the documents declassified after Steinbeck’s death proved decades later. The FBI did have a file on him, thick and detailed, covering years of surveillance.
And Hoover didn’t stop there! The FBI files show agents kept combing through every new Steinbeck book for signs of disloyalty to the government. They went as far as writing internal literary reviews of his novels! When Steinbeck published The Winter of Our Discontent in 1961, agents analyzed how the book portrayed cops trained by the Bureau. You’d almost want to laugh if it weren’t so chilling.
The surveillance ran more than forty years, until the writer died in 1968. And the whole time, the FBI officially denied ever investigating him. Only after the archives were declassified did the world find out how big this institutional harassment was. Steinbeck had been right from the start. They spied on him, they kept him from serving his country, they picked over every line he wrote and every place he went. All because he had the nerve to write the truth about what America was doing to its own citizens.
When Stalin tripped over The Grapes of Wrath
And while we’re on regimes that had trouble with this book, we absolutely have to tell this one because it’s absolutely delicious: in 1940 John Ford adapted The Grapes of Wrath for the screen with Henry Fonda as Tom Joad. The movie was a triumph in the States. It won two Oscars and picked up five more nominations. But somebody on the other side of the Iron Curtain had noticed it too. And that somebody was Joseph Stalin himself!
In 1948, right at the start of the Cold War, Stalin had what he thought was a stroke of genius. He approved the movie for Soviet theaters, figuring this story of an American family ground into poverty by a merciless capitalist system would make terrific anti-American propaganda. On paper it was airtight… An American movie showing the wreckage of capitalism, released with the Kremlin’s blessing to prove to the Soviet people that the West was nothing but exploitation and suffering. What was there to worry about? Nothing, on the face of it.
Except it didn’t go as planned at all. Soviet audiences didn’t walk out outraged at what happened to the Joads. They walked out stunned! Because the family’s misery wasn’t what stayed with them. Even the poorest Americans could afford a car, and that’s what they took away. A car! Absolute luxury for an ordinary Soviet citizen under Stalin. The USSR was selling itself as the paradise of workers and peasants, and here was a movie meant to expose capitalist horror accidentally showing the abyss between the two countries’ standards of living. So the film got pulled from theaters, very quietly. Judged too dangerous!
That story says something deep about The Grapes of Wrath and about Steinbeck in general. This book bothered absolutely everybody because it told the truth. And it’s well established that truth never takes a side. Too radical for the America of the landowners. Too revealing for Stalin’s USSR. Banned in the West for showing the poverty of workers. Banned in the East for showing that even that poverty looked enviable next to what a totally corrupted communism was giving its own people. Steinbeck pulled off the feat of getting censored by both superpowers on the planet at the same time. Which tells you plenty about the force of what he wrote.
Steinbeck’s Nobel, or the cursed writer’s revenge
After the years of fire that followed The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck never stopped writing. He published Cannery Row in 1945, The Pearl in 1947 and of course his huge family saga East of Eden in 1952. That one made it to the screen too, with some guy named James Dean in the lead. In 1947 he traveled to the Soviet Union with the photographer Robert Capa for a story that fed the paranoia of Hoover and his agents a little further. And in 1962 he published Travels with Charley, the touching account of a drive across America with his poodle, like a man trying to find the pulse of a country he didn’t quite recognize anymore.
That same year, 1962, the Swedish Academy gave him the Nobel Prize in Literature for “his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception.” After decades of surveillance, censorship, smears and threats, the man America had treated as an enemy from within was collecting the highest literary honor in the world. The irony there suggests some kinds of revenge are worth savoring.
But Steinbeck didn’t savor it much. The Academy’s pick got contested, including in Sweden, where one paper called it “one of the Academy’s biggest mistakes.” And when a reporter asked him if he thought he deserved the prize, Steinbeck answered with disarming honesty: “Frankly, no.” He told a college friend he’d written the damned speech at least 20 times, that every diplomatic attempt came out as a bunch of crap, and that he’d finally gotten mad one night and written exactly what he wanted to say: “I don’t know whether or not it’s good but at least it’s me.”
And it really was him! His Stockholm speech, delivered December 10, 1962, is remembered as one of the most powerful ever given at a Nobel ceremony. Deep in the Cold War, with the world living under permanent threat of nuclear annihilation, Steinbeck talked about the writer as a keeper of human conscience. He reminded everyone that literature “was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches,” but came out of humanity’s deepest need. And these are the words of his that still land today:
“And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.”
Two years later, in 1964, Steinbeck got the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The writer whose mail the FBI had read, whose service the army had refused and whose books had been thrown on a fire was now collecting the highest honors of the nation that persecuted him. If that isn’t pure American hypocrisy, we don’t know what is.
Nobody’s perfect, Steinbeck had a dark side too
We could stop here and leave you with the portrait of a spotless hero who defended the widow and the orphan to his last breath. That’s not how we work at NovaFuture. We admire Steinbeck for the depth of his work, and we also owe you the truth about his dark corners. We’re bringing them up because they’re nowhere near trivial.
Let’s start with the hardest part to swallow. In 1967, at 65, Steinbeck went to Vietnam as a reporter for Newsday. And there, the man who’d spent his life defending the oppressed came out squarely in favor of America’s dirty war. No qualifications, no critical distance at all. He filed pieces that flattered the military, with American soldiers cast as liberating heroes. Both his sons were serving there and he even visited one of them at the front, where they let him man a machine gun post at night while the rest of the platoon slept. He went on to dismiss antiwar protesters for their “shrill squeaking.” The New York Post called him out at the time for betraying his humanist past. And the American left that had carried him for thirty years turned on him.
That wasn’t the first time the left dropped him either. Back in 1948 a group of socialist women in Rome publicly condemned him for switching to the camp of war and anti-Marxism. In 1955 the Daily Worker, an American communist paper, went after the way he drew the left in his writing. And Steinbeck himself ended up saying socialism is just another form of religion, so an illusion. Knowing where he came from, that sentence is chilling.
Then there’s Israel. On a trip there, Steinbeck described the country as “an incredible texture of human endurance and the tough inflexibility of human will power.” His biographer Jay Parini caught the cruel irony of that blind admiration: “The Steinbeck of three decades earlier would surely have sniffed out the injustice.” The man who denounced the dispossession of Oklahoma farmers didn’t see, or didn’t want to see, the dispossession of a million Palestinians.
And then there’s Sanora Babb, an Oklahoma journalist who spent years documenting migrant life in the California camps. Her detailed notes were reportedly passed to Steinbeck by their shared editor at Random House. When The Grapes of Wrath blew up in bookstores, Babb’s publisher simply canceled her own novel on the same subject. She had to wait until 2004 to finally get it out. She was 97. Steinbeck never mentioned her, never thanked her.
The slide didn’t happen overnight. It came gradually, through tighter and tighter ties to the American Democratic establishment. Steinbeck became friends with Adlai Stevenson, the liberal candidate Eisenhower beat twice, then got close to John F. Kennedy, who charmed him with the image of a young, cultivated and progressive president. After Kennedy’s assassination, Steinbeck’s strongest bond was with Lyndon Johnson. Johnson invited him to the White House, consulted him, flattered him. In 1964 Johnson personally handed him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And Steinbeck, the writer the FBI had hunted for decades, let that long-awaited recognition go to his head. He finally felt accepted by his own country. The problem was that the country wanted him to look away from its worst abominations in exchange. And he did.
So how do you explain all that? How does a guy who slept in migrant camps and took death threats for telling the truth end up defending an imperialist war and having dinner at the White House without it bothering him? The answer is simple and terrible: the system swallowed Steinbeck whole!
In his last years he kept steady company with Democratic power and let himself be seduced by politicians who knew how to fake the progressive card while running wars on the other side of the world. The broke, unknown Steinbeck of the thirties now lived in New York in the middle of the establishment. Going bourgeois had done its work, slowly and surely.
And let’s be honest about one more thing. The seed of martial patriotism was there from the start, well before Vietnam. Steinbeck was never a pacifist. During World War II he wrote Bombs Away, a propaganda book for the Army Air Forces. He also wrote The Moon Is Down, a novel about the Norwegian resistance that served as an Allied propaganda tool. And when the FBI blocked his officer’s commission, he fought for war correspondent credentials and shipped out to cover the European front in 1943. His anger was social first, not antimilitarist. He was against the rich exploiting the poor. He had nothing against war itself.
In the thirties and forties that still worked, because the enemy was fascism and Roosevelt stood for the New Deal. Patriotism and social conscience pointed the same way. But when the Cold War flipped everything, when the enemy became communism and the Democrats launched into the Vietnam adventure, Steinbeck couldn’t tell the difference between loving his country and submitting to power. The poison of blind patriotism got him in the end.
That’s probably the bitterest lesson in this story. America tried to destroy Steinbeck with censorship, surveillance and death threats. It failed. So it did something far more effective. It co-opted him. It seduced him. It absorbed him. And the writer who made the powerful tremble ended up sitting at their table.
Obviously, none of this takes anything away from his enormous talent or from the force of his great novels. The Grapes of Wrath is still an absolute masterpiece, and the story of his persecution is still damning testimony about the deep nature of American power. But knowing that even Steinbeck got swallowed by the machine shows you how dangerous this system is. Not only because it’s brutal when it feels threatened. Because it’s terribly seductive when it decides to open its arms and walk you over to the dark side. So let’s keep that in mind for every media impostor trying to pass as a progressive. That’s another reason it helps to know Steinbeck’s life and work. Because it talks about us, our dreams, our ideals and all our contradictions.
Conclusion: what if Steinbeck had been European?
Let’s close this portrait with a simple question that says a lot. What would have happened if John Ernst Steinbeck had been born in France, Germany or Spain instead of California? The answer is obvious. Nobody would have fucked with him like that.
When Émile Zola published Germinal in 1885, a novel about the misery of the miners of northern France with at least as much brutality as The Grapes of Wrath, nobody sent the FBI after him! Nobody burned his book in a public square. Nobody refused him the right to serve his country. Zola became a national figure instead. A genuine monument of French literature. Sure, when he defended Captain Dreyfus with his famous “J’accuse,” the courts convicted him. But the Republic cleared him in the end and France put him in the Panthéon.
Victor Hugo spent nineteen years in exile for standing up to Napoleon III. When he came home, a million people turned out for his funeral. Charles Dickens described the misery of the London slums in terms as raw as Steinbeck’s and Victorian England made him a national hero.
In Europe, a writer who calls out the injustices of his time ends up in the textbooks with his name on street signs. In America, we burn his books, we have the political police watch him for forty years, we keep him from wearing his own country’s uniform and we drag him through the mud in Congress. And when all that isn’t enough to shut him up, we bring him in gently, we invite him to dinner at the White House until he forgets what he was fighting for.
That’s the real face of America! Not the one in the romantic comedies shot in Manhattan, not the grand speeches about freedom and democracy. The face of a country that since its founding treats anyone who dares show the reality of its inequality as an enemy from within. A country where writing a novel about poor people and actually moving readers counts as a subversive act.
MAGA invented nothing. And honestly, what could they invent besides hate and contempt for intelligence? Book burnings, political surveillance of artists, persecution of people who think differently… all of it was around long before Donald Trump. Steinbeck paid the price nearly a century ago. Thousands of others paid it before him and after him. MAGA just stopped pretending any of it existed and started openly owning that they’re the enemies of every form of progressive thought.
Steinbeck died December 20, 1968, in New York. He was 66. They buried him in Salinas, the town where he was born and whose own people spent a long time refusing to forgive him for making it famous for the wrong reasons. The Salinas public library didn’t agree to put his books on the shelves until the 1990s. Yes, you read that right: the 1990s!
Today a national museum in that same town carries his name. The streets around it are named after his characters. And The Grapes of Wrath gets taught in every university in the country. For how much longer? The question stands.
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