With searing prose, he etched the plight of migrant families: "… in the faces of the husband and his wife, you begin to see an expression you will notice on every face; not worry, but absolute terror of the starvation that crowds in against the borders of the camp." He described migrants clinging to respectability: "The house is about 10 feet by 10 feet, and it is built completely of corrugated paper… With the first rain the carefully built house will slop down into a brown, pulpy mush…" Witness to social upheaval, Steinbeck's eye reported the conditions endured and the dignity maintained by people on the edge.

Seven years later, sent to cover World War II, he brought the same compassion and sharp eye for detail to the neglected aspects of the war-helmeted men on a troop ship looking "like long rows of mushrooms"; bomber crews dressing for combat, getting "bigger and bigger as layer on layer of equipment is put on. They walk stiffly, like artificial men"; the people of Dover who are "incorrigibly, incorruptibly unimpressed" with German might and muscle. And in one of the most emblematic pieces, Steinbeck writes about London under seige:

People who try to tell you what the blitz was like in London start with fire and explosion and then almost invariably end up with some very tiny detail which crept in and set and became the symbol of the whole thing for them… "It's the glass," says one man, "the sound in the morning of the broken glass being swept up, the vicious, flat tinkle."… An old woman was selling little miserable sprays of sweet lavender. The city was rocking under the bombs and the light of burning buildings made it like day… And in one little hole in the roar her voice got in-a squeaky voice. "Lavender!" she said. "Buy Lavender for luck."