Books: Oakies

THE GRAPES OF WRATH—John Steinbeck—Viking ($2.75).

On California's highways during the last few years a tourist sometimes encounters a mysterious and appalling sight—thousands of jalopies, driven by hungry-faced men, bulging with ragged children, dirty bedding, blackened pots & pans. Hated, terrorized, necessary, they are migrant workers who harvest the orchards and vineyards, the cotton and vegetable fields of the richest valleys on earth. Their homes are filthy squatters' camps on the side roads, beside the rivers and irrigation ditches. Their occupational diseases are rickets, pellagra, dysentery, typhoid, pneumonia, starvation, sullen hatred exploding periodically in bloody strikes. Old American stock, they are...