Steinbeck was known to have borrowed from field notes taken during 1938 by Farm Security Administration worker and author Sanora Babb. While she collected personal stories about the lives of the displaced migrants for a novel she was developing, her supervisor, Tom Collins, shared her reports with Steinbeck, who at the time was working for the San Francisco News. Babb’s own novel, Whose Names Are Unknown, was eclipsed in 1939 by the success of The Grapes of Wrath and was shelved until it was finally published in 2004, a year before Babb’s death.

The Grapes of Wrath developed from The Harvest Gypsies, a series of seven articles that ran in the San Francisco News, from October 5 to 12, 1936. The newspaper commissioned that work on migrant workers from the Midwest in California’s agriculture industry. (It was later compiled and published separately.)
…
Following the publication of Sanora Babb’s Whose Names Are Unknown in 2004, some scholars noted strong parallels between that work — the notes for which Steinbeck is widely believed to have examined— and The Grapes of Wrath.

Writing in The Steinbeck Review, Michael J. Meyer noted numerous “obvious similarities” between the two novels “that even a cursory reading will reveal,” … Meyer, a Steinbeck bibliographer, stops short of labeling these parallels as plagiarism but concludes that “Steinbeck scholars would do well to read Babb — if only to see for themselves the echoes of Grapes that abound in her prose.”

Steinbeck scholar David M. Wrobel wrote that “the John Steinbeck/Sanora Babb story sounds like a classic smash-and-grab: celebrated California author steals the material of unknown Oklahoma writer, resulting in his financial success and her failure to get her work published...Steinbeck absorbed field information from many sources, primarily Tom Collins and Eric H. Thomsen, regional director of the federal migrant camp program in California, who accompanied Steinbeck on missions of mercy…if Steinbeck read Babb’s extensive notes as carefully as he did the reports of Collins, he would certainly have found them useful. His interaction with Collins and Thomsen — and their influence on the writing of The Grapes of Wrath — is documented because Steinbeck acknowledged both. Sanora Babb went unmentioned.”

Writing in Broad Street (magazine), Carla Dominguez described Babb as “devastated and bitter” that Random House cancelled publication of her own novel after The Grapes of Wrath was released in 1939. It is clear, she wrote, that “Babb’s retellings, interactions, and reflections were secretly read over and appropriated by Steinbeck. Babb met Steinbeck briefly and by chance at a lunch counter, but she never thought that he had been reading her notes because he did not mention it.”

A guy professing to stand up for the little people, while stealing from one of them.
Not a new story.

If they listen and agree, then he does.
Perception is everything in art.

Trivia bonus: I looked up the article about Steinbeck’s book at Wikipedia and found this little note, so I wondered if that figured into your allegory.

“American rock singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen named his 11th studio album, The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995), after the character. The first track on the album “shares the same title”. The song – and to a lesser extent, the others on the album – draws comparisons between the Dust Bowl and modern times.”

Good comments about Springsteen. I saw Darkness as bringing to life that inevitable fork in the road at which juncture anyone and everyone—from, say, a young Joe Biden to a young Joe Sixpack– suddenly finds himself all but forced to make a commitment to one available path or the other, with time running out and likely no turning back once the die is cast.

Springsteen started working on Darkness while in his mid twenties.

From my view, there was an almost shockingly traditional religious (i.e., Catholic) fervor to Darkness: with the only clear choices coming down to either taking up the proverbial Cross and following the Truth down the dark, narrow, twisting path wherever that path might lead; or to glide virtually unimpeded– albeit with no small bit of self-recrimination– down the wider, much more fashionable, seemingly much smoother option.

I thought the “seriousness” present in Darkness—which is there in spades– was in this particular instance a transcendent, glorious thing, and often exhilarating.

It’s gotta be my all time favorite album.

I eventually lost all interest in following Springsteen’s career after it became much too obvious (IMHO) which of those two paths he, himself, had chosen.

He wanted to be one of the virtue-signaling cool kids and he is. Congratulations, sir.

I’m sure the millions of dollars worth of free publicity had nothing to do with it.

He’s a lousy guitar player. I saw him on the “Black and White” tribute to Roy Orbison jamming with Orbison and longtime studio whiz James Burton on “Mean Woman Blues”.

Burton takes a solo – smokin’ as you would expect.

Orbison takes a solo – you think of Orbison as a singer not a guitarist but it was pretty tasty.

Springsteen takes a solo – sucked. I also didn’t like the way he tried to steal the stage from Orbison, a rock legend just making a comeback at the time.