Books like In Dubious Battle
Jim Nolan, a young Communist recruit, goes with the seasoned organiser Mac to a California valley to lead the apple pickers in a strike against the growers.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of In Dubious Battle
Of Mice and Men
Two migrant workers in Depression-era California dream of owning a small farm, but loneliness and violence conspire against even the simplest hopes.
The Grapes of Wrath
A dispossessed Oklahoma family drives west to California during the Dust Bowl, finding not the promised land but exploitation, hunger, and the limits of dignity.
Germinal
Étienne Lantier, an unemployed mechanic, takes work in a coal mine in northern France and leads the miners in a strike against starvation wages, which becomes an elemental battle between labour and capital.
To Have and Have Not
Harry Morgan, a charter-boat captain in Key West cheated out of his fee in the Depression, turns to running rum and people across the straits from Cuba to keep his family fed.
The Four Winds
In 1934, as drought and dust storms ruin the Texas Panhandle farm she has worked for years, Elsa Martinelli must choose between staying with the land and taking her two children west to California, where the promise of work is not what it seems.
Salka Valka
Salka Valka arrives as a little girl with her destitute mother in an Icelandic fishing village, where she grows up tough, poor and in thrall to the merchant who owns everything.
In Evil Hour
In a small Colombian town under a military mayor, anonymous lampoons start appearing on doors overnight, exposing the residents' secrets, and one of them leads to a killing.
The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists
Frank Owen, a skilled house painter in the seaside town of Mugsborough, works alongside men who defend the system that keeps them poor, and tries to talk them into socialism over their tea breaks.
The Day of the Locust
Tod Hackett, a young set designer at a Hollywood studio in the 1930s, falls for a would-be starlet and watches the bored, disappointed people who came to California to die turn ugly.
The Gods Will Have Blood
In 1793, Évariste Gamelin, a poor young painter and ardent Jacobin, is appointed a juror on the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris.
Jean Barois
Told largely in dialogue and documents, the life of Jean Barois, raised a Catholic, who loses his faith to science, founds a crusading review during the Dreyfus Affair and faces death.
Darkness at Noon
Rubashov, an old Bolshevik who helped build the revolution, is arrested by the regime he served and interrogated in his cell, and the novel follows the logic that leads loyal men to confess to crimes they never committed.