In Dubious Battle

John Steinbeck

Apr 2011 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Tom Stechschulte

About this audiobook

A riveting novel of labor strife and apocalyptic violence that maps the frontier where the masses become a mobAt once a relentlessly fast-paced, admirably observed novel of social unrest and the story of a young man’s struggle for identity, In Dubious Battle is set in the California apple country, where a strike by migrant workers against rapacious landowners spirals out of control, as principled defiance metamorphoses into blind fanaticism. Caught in the upheaval is Jim Nolan, a once aimless man who finds himself in the course of the strike, briefly becomes its leader, and is ultimately crushed in its service.“Dramatically intense, beautifully written. It is the real thing; it has a vigor of sheer storytelling that may sweep away many prejudices.†—The New Republic

Ratings and reviews

excellent book and well read

About the author

John Steinbeck, born in Salinas, California, in 1902, grew up in a fertile agricultural valley, about 25 miles from the Pacific Coast. Both the valley and the coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929). After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two California books, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later collected in The Long Valley (1938). Popular success and financial security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935), stories about Monterey’s paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the California laboring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the book considered by many his finest, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The Grapes of Wrath won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1939.Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, and, in 1964, he was presented with the United States Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Steinbeck died in New York in 1968. Today, more than 30 years after his death, he remains one of America's greatest writers and cultural figures.

Tom Stechschulte has worked as an audiobook narrator since 1996. Tom has amassed a considerable range of titles, including young adult titles, celebrity memoirs, and historical fiction like The Big Oyster. His numerous Broadway credits include The Seagull, Inherit the Wind, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and I'm Not Rappaport. Besides film credits including the Manchurian Candidate and What About Bob?, Stechshulte was featured on one of the most famous episodes of The Incredible Hulk ever, September 1979's "Blind Rage."