| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.2

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Working in the Garden: American Writers and the Industrialization of Agriculture. By William Conlogue. Studies in Rural Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. ix + 230 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $39.95, paper $18.95.

Many who work in environmental and agrarian history got their first taste of a rural imaginary when reading The Grapes of Wrath (1939) in high school. This bleak story of the Joad family, dispossessed migrant laborers trying to make their way in a bitter agricultural landscape, captured the dark underside of an emerging industrial agricultural system. Yet how many realized the historical reality behind the book—for example, the dispute between Steinbeck and Ruth Comfort Mitchell, whose Of Human Kindness (1940) was a vigorous defense of the industrial farming system that, she felt, Steinbeck had characterized unfairly? This public disagreement is but one of the historical referents William Conlogue employs in demonstrating the reciprocal relationship between farm crises and farm novels.

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