The venture capitalist Shaun Maguire is a particularly prolific poster. And lately, his takes have become almost unavoidable.

Maguire manages Sequoia Capital’s stake in Elon Musk’s various companies, including the social network formerly known as Twitter, and he regularly amplifies and excuses Musk’s extreme political opinions. He’s also fond of sharing his own. Over the weekend, he posted a theory that “antifa” is committing mass voter fraud by having ballots sent by the hundreds to vacant houses; Musk signal-boosted Maguire’s concern with the message “Anyone else seeing this sort of thing?” Last week, Maguire advanced the perspective that “DEI was the most effective KGB opp of all time.” To his more than 150,000 followers, the VC has made it clear that he is “prepared to lose friends” over his choice to spit out the metaphorical Kool-Aid that caused him to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

On X, Maguire shows up in the feed alongside other prominent VCs who support Donald Trump—among them, David Sacks of Craft Ventures and Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures. They all express similar opinions in similar ways, and they do so more or less constantly. (Maguire, who did not respond to a request for an interview, posted to X dozens of times this past Saturday alone.) This is an example of, as Paul Krugman recently noted, the “tech bro style in American politics.” It is largely defined by a flat, good-versus-evil worldview. The good? Free speech, which Democrats want to eradicate. The evil? Immigration, which is a plot by Democrats to allow violent criminals into the country and steal the election. San Francisco? A once-great American city purposefully ruined by Democrats. Kamala Harris? Sleepwalking into World War III. Trump? According to Musk, he is “far from being a threat to democracy”—actually, voting for him is “the only way to save it!”

A “vibe shift” is under way in Silicon Valley, Michael Gibson, a VC and former vice president of grants at the Thiel Foundation, told me. Eight years ago, the notorious entrepreneur Peter Thiel was the odd man out when he announced his support for Trump. The rest of the Valley appeared to have been horrified by the candidate—particularly by his draconian and racist views on immigration, on which the tech industry relies. This year, J. D. Vance, a Thiel acolyte and former VC himself, is Trump’s running mate. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, co-founders of the legendary VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, came out in full support of Trump in a podcast episode released just before Joe Biden dropped out of the election. (Last Friday, Axios reported that Horowitz informed Andreessen Horowitz staff members that he and his wife, Felicia, will donate to support Harris “as a result of our friendship” with the candidate. “The Biden Administration,” his note continues, “has been exceptionally destructive on tech policy across the industry, but especially as it relates to Crypto/Blockchain and AI,” mirroring language from the podcast during which he and Andreessen endorsed Trump.)

[Read: Silicon Valley got their guy]

It’s doubtful that the thoughts of these prominent VCs reflect a broader change in the electorate—tech workers generally support Harris, and barring an unbelievable upset, California will go blue on November 5, as it has for decades. (Though as my colleague Adrienne LaFrance has pointed out, Trump’s vote share in Silicon Valley was 23 percent in 2020—small, but higher than the 20 percent he received in 2016.) And many well-known VCs back Harris, including Rabois’ colleague and Khosla Ventures’ namesake, Vinod Khosla, along with Mark Cuban and the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. This time around, Thiel has not thrown his weight behind Trump but has instead indicated that he would choose him over Harris if there were a gun to his head.

But it is nonetheless significant that a number of influential—and very rich—men are eager to go against the grain. Silicon Valley has historically prided itself on technological supremacy and a belief in social progress: Now many of its loudest and most well-resourced personalities support a candidate who espouses retrograde views across practically every measure of societal progress imaginable. “We are talking about a few people, but I think this also reflects the political economy of the Valley right now,” Margaret O’Mara, an American-history professor at the University of Washington and the author of The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, told me. “There’s a great deal of money and power and influence concentrated in the hands of a very few people, including these people who are extremely online and have become extremely vocal in support of Trump.” (Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)

If Trump wins, there is a nonzero chance that he would give some of these people major roles in his second administration—Musk is already lobbying for one, with apparent success. If Trump loses, the Harris administration will have highly visible and vehement critics to whom a lot of people listen. Silicon Valley’s main characters are entering the culture war and bringing their enormous fan bases with them.

To some extent, this is just business as usual. O’Mara noted that although the tech industry used to claim to be apolitical, it has always had its fair share of lobbyists in Washington, D.C., like every other industry. More than anything else, the industry’s interests have simply followed the money. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan supported defense spending and big contracts with the California tech companies. The result was that “Silicon Valley leaned Republican,” she said. “Silicon Valley started leaning Democratic in the Clinton years, when Clinton and Gore were big proponents of the internet and the growth of the internet industries.”

Now many of these venture capitalists are holding on to huge bets on cryptocurrency. They fear—or enjoy suggesting—that Harris is plotting to destroy the industry entirely, a perception she’s trying to combat. Some of them have circulated an unsourced rumor that she would appoint to her Cabinet Gary Gensler, who has pursued strict regulations against the crypto industry as chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission. (Meanwhile, Trump has promised to save the crypto industry from “living in hell.”) Many in the tech industry worry about Harris’s plans to raise the top capital-gains tax rate. And her support for taxing centimillionaires’ unrealized investment gains has been particularly unpopular. Gibson argued that it would destroy the VC industry completely: “We would see the innovation economy come to a halt.” Even Harris’s supporters in the tech world have pressured the campaign not to pursue the tax; “There’s optimism that this can’t possibly be real,” Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box, told The New York Times in August.  

Also at issue is the labor movement. The tech industry came up during an era of lower regulation and declining union power, O’Mara pointed out. Nonunionized workforces have been essential to many of these companies’ business models, and collective action used to be more rare in their perk-filled offices. Yet during and after the pandemic, contractors and employees of major tech companies expressed dissatisfaction en masse: They wanted more diversity in the workforce, fairer treatment, and protection from the layoffs sweeping the industry. Some of them unionized. The companies faced, as O’Mara put it, “discontent among a group of people who had never been discontented.” The new labor movement has clearly rankled prominent tech figures, Musk among them. He is challenging the nearly century-old legislation behind the National Labor Relations Board, with the goal of having it declared unconstitutional.  

[Read: Palo Alto’s first tech giant was a horse farm]

But business doesn’t explain everything. The American public’s attitude toward the tech industry has curdled since 2016, in large part because of critical reporting—about labor abuses, privacy problems, manipulative algorithms, and the bizarre and upsetting experiences one might have on social platforms at any given time. When I spoke with Gibson, he suggested that declining revenue in the digital-media business may have created some “rivalrous envy” on the part of journalists. (And it’s true that the media industry can and does cite the whims of tech platforms as a source of its financial problems.) “We are being lied to,” Andreessen wrote in his widely read and rueful Techno-Optimist Manifesto last year. “We are told to be angry, bitter, and resentful about technology.” This, he suggested, was not just wrongheaded but harmful. Andreessen Horowitz, at one point, launched a media publication with the stated mission of publishing writing that was “unapologetically pro-tech.”

Meanwhile, the federal government has pursued antitrust action and bipartisan efforts to regulate social media, while state governments have won huge settlements for workers. This has been a major shock: Silicon Valley was celebrated by previous Democratic administrations and was particularly welcome in both the Obama campaign and White House. Now some tech leaders are being treated like villains—which seems to have led some of them to embrace the label. “These are some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country, and they are presenting themselves, in a way, like Trump is,” O’Mara observed. They’re positioning themselves in public based on their grievances and their feeling that they’ve been unjustly targeted and maybe even embarrassingly spurned.

Venture capitalists are public figures in a way they didn’t used to be. Many of them were famous founders first, and they have their own brands to maintain. “It’s part of the job to promote yourself,” Lee Edwards, a general partner at Root Ventures, told me. “I think you get in the habit of just tweeting your thoughts.”

That might have hurt business not too long ago. In 2016, when Thiel endorsed Trump, Gibson had to worry about losing seats at dinners or speaking slots at events. That’s not the case now, he told me. He pointed to Mark Zuckerberg’s recent efforts to distance himself from Democrats. Although he has had a terrible relationship with Trump in the past—one that reached its nadir when the former president was temporarily banned from Facebook over the inflammatory comments he made during the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021—he has made tentative overtures to the candidate recently. The two have reportedly spoken one-on-one a couple of times this year, and Zuckerberg complimented Trump on his “bad ass” reaction (a fist pump) after the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. Zuckerberg hasn’t said how he’ll vote, but it’s a sign of change that he would talk about Trump in these terms at all. “The chill in the air has warmed up,” Gibson said.

When I spoke with Kathryn Olmsted, a historian at UC Davis and the author of Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism, she said she’d be interested to hear whether this turned out to be a California story or “a very rich-person” story that happened to be taking place in California. Maybe it wasn’t so much about Silicon Valley or the tech industry as it was about billionaires. From another perspective, it could be a really rich-person story taking place on a social-media platform owned by one of those really rich people. And those people, despite their increasing public vociferousness, might actually be cloistered in their own world—isolated and deluded enough to believe that migrants are somehow a threat to their livelihood and that radical leftists are really going to steal the election.  

“What I’m seeing from VCs around the country is different from what I’m seeing amongst the Twitter VCs,” Candice Matthews Brackeen, of Lightship Capital, told me. “Some of us live … off of there.” Others I spoke with pointed to an effort called VCs for Kamala, a loose organization with hundreds of signatories on a letter supporting Harris’s candidacy. That group was organized by Leslie Feinzaig, a venture capitalist and registered independent who says she has never before made a political donation.

The recent media coverage of Silicon Valley “was creating the impression that the entire industry, that all of venture capital, was going MAGA,” Feinzaig told me. “In my conversations, that was just not the case.” She wanted someone to step up and say that a lot of VCs were supporting Harris and that it wasn’t because they were on the far left. Many of them were registered Republicans, even. They simply had different priorities from the rich, angry guys posting on X. “I’m at the beginning of my career,” she said. “A lot of these guys are at the pinnacle of theirs.” She couldn’t say exactly what had happened to them. “There’s a cynicism at that point that I just don’t share.”

It is likely, but by no means certain, that in May 1938, the writers John Steinbeck and Sanora Babb met in a café near Arvin, California. Both were in town to chronicle the plight of migrants who were flooding the state to escape the decimation of the Dust Bowl. Both were writing fiction about it—Steinbeck had abandoned two novels on the subject earlier that year, while Babb had received an enthusiastic response from Random House for the opening chapters of her novel in progress, Whose Names Are Unknown. And both were connected to Tom Collins, a staffer at the Farm Security Administration (FSA), a federal agency providing aid to the migrants. To Steinbeck, Collins was a friend and a passkey to the migrant experience. To Babb, he was a mentor and supervisor; she had volunteered to document living conditions in the camps.

What happened next is in some ways clear as day, in others frustratingly fuzzy. The clear part is a tale of profound literary unfairness: Steinbeck received FSA field notes, compiled largely (but not entirely) from Babb’s observations and interviews, after which he began a punishing 100-day writing sprint to produce The Grapes of Wrath, the foundational American novel about the Great Depression. Babb’s book, delivered later, would be scotched. The Random House co-founder Bennett Cerf alerted Babb that she was late to the finish line in August 1939. “What rotten luck for you that ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ should not only have come out before your book was submitted but should have so swept the country!” Cerf wrote. “Obviously, another book at this time about exactly the same subject would be a sad anticlimax!”

Here’s the fuzzy part: Over time, an understandably frustrated Babb would insist that she, not Collins, had personally handed over the reports to Steinbeck—an act that would make his appropriation look more brazen and personal. “Tom asked me to give him my notes,” Babb would write 40 years after that alleged café meeting. “I did. Naïve me.” It doesn’t appear that Steinbeck ever wrote about meeting Babb, or even mentioned her by name, though it’s plausible that two diligent reporters on the same beat would want to compare notes.

Fuzzier still is the question of how much of Grapes was written on the back of the FSA notes, how much of that research was Babb’s—and how much it matters. Her observations almost certainly helped Steinbeck shape his rendering of the migrants. Babb’s entries were rich and thorough—having grown up on a failing farm in the Oklahoma panhandle, she was particularly trusted by Collins to connect with the migrants. When Babb shared her jottings, directly or indirectly, she was likely motivated by the urge to get their experience across through whatever medium might help them.

So what would you call the ensuing fame of one novel and the preemptive burial of another? Appropriation? Theft? Bad timing? Sexism? Perhaps, in the end, it was simply evidence of a cruel flaw of publishing: Sometimes its decision makers conclude—not always for good reasons—that there isn’t room for many stories about one major event. That a short-term judgment about what the market will bear can choke off a literary legacy and, to some extent, impoverish a culture.

Sanora Babb (seated in the center) at an FSA migrant camp in 1938. (Courtesy of Sanora Babb Papers / Harry Ransom Center / University of Texas at Austin. © Joanne Dearcopp.)

One virtue of Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s new biography, Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb, is that it keeps Steinbeck off the stage for as long as possible. Despite Babb’s rotten luck, as Cerf put it, the editor’s snub wasn’t the defining element of her life and career. A dedicated leftist, she’d published fiction and reportage in little magazines and journals such as New Masses, befriending working-class writers including William Saroyan and Nelson Algren. She had a long marriage to the Oscar-winning cinematographer James Wong Howe that sometimes bent but didn’t break under the pressure of his work. And though Grapes derailed her career, Babb never stopped mining her childhood for material. In Oklahoma, Colorado, and Kansas, she’d experienced poverty, crop failures, and an absent dad; her mother struggled to keep a bakery running while her father chased illusory dreams as a gambler and semipro baseball player. Wind highlights Babb’s determination to chronicle such deprivation while writing her way out of it.

This personal history, according to Dunkle, goes some way toward explaining why Babb might have made the career-crippling decision to open-source her notes. “You have to understand that Sanora Babb came from a communist, liberal background—she was a community-based writer,” Dunkle told me over Zoom from UC Davis, where she is a lecturer in the English department. “She was part of a writers’ group for 40 years with Ray Bradbury,” and professional collaboration was baked into her ethos. “I don’t think she thought that Steinbeck would appropriate things from her notes and that it would make it impossible for her to publish her book.”

[Read: Plagiarism is the next “fake news”]

Riding Like the Wind doesn’t argue that Steinbeck plagiarized Babb, but rather asserts that he appropriated her writing without credit; it also suggests that the scope and perspective of The Grapes of Wrath didn’t become clear to Steinbeck until he had those notes in hand. Dunkle quotes Steinbeck himself to show that the field reports commissioned by Collins (one of the people to whom Grapes was dedicated) were essential to an authentic portrayal of his milieu: “Letter from Tom with vital information to be used later. He is good,” the author wrote in his diary while toiling over his novel. “I need this stuff. It is exact and just the thing that will be used against me if I am wrong.”

Although Dunkle’s framing is backed by fresh evidence, some fuzziness persists. In his 2020 biography of Steinbeck, Mad at the World, William Souder expresses skepticism about whether Babb actually met Steinbeck—or would have willingly handed over notes she was using for her own novel. Speaking to me on the phone from his home in Minnesota, he deferred to Dunkle’s research (and Babb’s statements) on that point, but said it is difficult to discern what material of Babb’s was used, and how.

Souder and other scholars have detected echoes of Babb’s notes in Grapes. Her observations about the migrants’ “mortgage-lost farms, bank-claimed machinery and animals, dust-ruined acres” have the same biblical cadence that Steinbeck mastered in his novel. Their descriptions of stillborn babies are similar; both use creatures like insects and turtles as metaphors for the migrants’ plight.

Without direct evidence, however, a definitive link can’t be proved; both authors were, after all, in the same place at the same time. “It’s really hard to disentangle things and say, ‘Well, this idea comes from Steinbeck; this idea comes from Babb,’” Souder said. “I think that’s borderline impossible.”

And Steinbeck had at least as much right to the subject. He had been writing about Dust Bowl migrants well before meeting Babb; in 1936, he wrote dispatches on them for the San Francisco News; that same year, he published In Dubious Battle, about a California fruit-worker strike. “He’s a native of California,” Peter Van Coutren, an archivist at the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University, told me. “He is a keen observer of what’s … happening here in California, and he’s looking for a way to promote his ideals of fairness, human rights, and human equality.”

Babb in front of a window display featuring her first published book, The Lost Traveler, at Pickwick Books in Los Angeles in 1958. (Courtesy of Sanora Babb Papers / Harry Ransom Center / University of Texas at Austin. © Joanne Dearcopp.)

For all the parallels, a reader would be unlikely to mistake one novel for the other. Their plots rhyme, especially in the latter chapters, which concern migrant families trapped and exploited by low-paying conglomerate farms. But where Grapes is relentlessly symphonic and often melodramatic, Unknown—which was finally edited and released 20 years ago—is intimate and restrained, focusing acutely on the slow-motion erosion of the agrarian American dream in a pattern of exploitation that the Dust Bowl only intensified. Its portrait of an Oklahoma-panhandle community undone by dust storms, depicting miscarriage and suicide along with economic devastation, is visceral and honed, more in line with Algren than Steinbeck.

Babb had a gift for weaving together individual desperation and systemic failure. In a fine section in the first half of Unknown, a family patriarch, Milt, contemplates the coming weather and practically wills it to save his family:

He looked at the edges of the sky, hoping for clouds or the steely haze that might mean early snow. Off to the northwest a bank of clouds lay just darker than the sky, still like a great animal waiting to spring, showing the sleepy fire of its eyes when the faint autumn lightning winked. It was far away and would spend its strength on other land. His wheat and that of every other prairie farm was waiting in the ground for rain.

In his “rotten luck” letter, Cerf wrote to Babb that “the last third of your book is so completely like ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ that the families and characters might basically be interchanged in the two.” This is exactly right but also completely misses the point: Collective experiences are, by their nature, shared, but Babb’s characterization of them was wholly her own. And while Grapes chronicles the injustices that migrants faced in California, Unknown shows how farmers struggled with them in Oklahoma, bringing their dread and suspicions of authority westward.

Two writers with divergent styles, both capturing a cataclysmic American event: It’s difficult to believe the marketplace didn’t have room for them both. “The excuse given by Cerf that the field was too crowded to hold another novel of the same seems flimsy at best,” Van Coutren, of the Steinbeck Center, told me. “So I imagine there was some other push for him to come up with a reason to dismiss her, and I see that dismissal … as, most likely, because she was a young woman writer who was just getting started.”

[Read: The hazards of writing while female]

This is Dunkle’s conclusion as well, and it’s a reasonable one. The publishing industry could accommodate contemporaneous World War II novels about the Pacific Theater, including From Here to Eternity and The Caine Mutiny; Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep opened the door for Jewish American immigrant literature, rather than slamming it shut.

The closest parallels to Babb’s predicament might be the fate of innovators such as Alfred Russel Wallace, who came up with the concept of natural selection around the same time as Charles Darwin, or Gottfried Liebniz, who developed a variant of calculus just as Isaac Newton did. But fiction isn’t science. It’s a study in emotion and perspective, and Grapes and Unknown are distinct books. Dunkle said that Grapes of Wrath makes her think of her grandmother, who grew up in Oklahoma. When Dunkle told her that she was reading Grapes in class, her grandmother snapped: Don’t ever talk to me about Steinbeck again. “She hated the book,” Dunkle recalled, “and I couldn’t understand why.” But the more closely she read the influential novel, the more she noticed Steinbeck’s tendency to depict his characters as victims with little agency of their own.

Dunkle’s book may help elevate Babb’s status, not simply because it so thoroughly explores the Steinbeck affair but because it succeeds at doing what all good literary biographies do: It makes a case for reading old writing in new ways. Steinbeck thrived in an era when sweep and melodrama and heft—not to mention manliness—signified quality literature. Babb, arguably, speaks more directly to this moment, which rewards clear portraits of marginalization and a grasp of how sociopolitical forces shape everyday relationships. Babb didn’t get the chance she deserved, but she knew as well as anyone how much the world was suffused with unfairness alongside hope and ambition. It’s right there in the final line of Unknown: “They would rise and fall and, in their falling, rise again.”