Salome of the Tenements shocked many critics and writers when first published in 1923, but its author was immediately hailed as a major new talent. A love story of a working-class Salome and her highborn John the Baptist, the novel is based on the real-life story of Jewish immigrant Rose Pastor's fairytale romance with the millionaire socialist Graham Stokes. It also reflects Yezierska's own aborted romance with the famous educator John Dewey. Yezierska's passionate but cynical novel poses oppositions such as cultural type/stereotype, passion/reason, and ethnic identity/assimilation, and it...
Salome of the Tenements shocked many critics and writers when first published in 1923, but its author was immediately hailed as a major new talent. A ...
The Depression era closing of a Ford plant sends Andy and two companions to Moscow to find work in a Soviet automotive plant, where he meets Natasha, an exemplar of the new Soviet woman. Based on Myra Page's own experiences in Moscow during the first Five-Year Plan, Natasha is a portrait of women's contradictory social position in the early periods of socialist construction. At the core of this novel is a firsthand look at revolutionized relations of production in the early Soviet Union - changes that bring about the conversion of Andy into a Moscow Yankee. While revealing some of the...
The Depression era closing of a Ford plant sends Andy and two companions to Moscow to find work in a Soviet automotive plant, where he meets Natasha, ...
A story of the industrialization of the South, To Make My Bread revolves around a family of Appalachian mountaineers - small farmers, hunters, and moonshiners - driven by economic conditions to the milltown and transformed into millhands, strikers, and rebels against the established order. Recognized as one of the major works on the Gastonia textile strike, Grace Lumpkin's novel is important for anyone interested in cultural or feminist history as it deals with early generations of women radicals committed to addressing the difficult connections of class and race. Suzanne Sowinska's...
A story of the industrialization of the South, To Make My Bread revolves around a family of Appalachian mountaineers - small farmers, hunters, and moo...
I'd rather fail in story writing than succeed in anything else, Josephine Herbst declared in 1913. The Iowa native's Trexler family trilogy, with Pity Is Not Enough as its first volume, shows clearly that Herbst in fact succeeded at story-telling. In this novel Herbst draws loosely on her family history, using Reconstruction's demise in Georgia to link the advance of free market capitalism to the North's abandonment of its commitment to racial justice. The protagonists - Catherine Trexler and her brother Joe, a carpetbagger embroiled in railroad scandals - are ripped apart financially and...
I'd rather fail in story writing than succeed in anything else, Josephine Herbst declared in 1913. The Iowa native's Trexler family trilogy, with Pity...
Originally published in 1953, Burning Valley tells the story of Benedict Bulmanis, son of a Lithuanian immigrant steel worker in western Pennsylvania. Determined to become a priest, Benedict faces inner conflict as he witnesses the steelworkers' struggle against the destruction of their homes and the separation of classes that even his church cannot escape. As the story unfolds, Benedict loses his faith in God but acquires a new faith, in the power of the working class and the justice of their cause. Alan Wald's introduction focuses on the semi-autobiographical aspect of the book as well as...
Originally published in 1953, Burning Valley tells the story of Benedict Bulmanis, son of a Lithuanian immigrant steel worker in western Pennsylvania....
Written from a black perspective by a white author, bears witness to the structural racism of a social order that sets ordinary people of different colors against each other to the disadvantage of all. This book contains stories of humor and humiliation, of prostitution and pride, of love and murder.
Written from a black perspective by a white author, bears witness to the structural racism of a social order that sets ordinary people of different co...
Revealing the legacy of the 1930s for the war years and the McCarthy era, this book explores the personal impact of hard political reality with which the author himself has been so well acquainted. It follows Carl Myers, who progresses from an objective interest in scientific problems to a concern with the human implications of those problems.
Revealing the legacy of the 1930s for the war years and the McCarthy era, this book explores the personal impact of hard political reality with which ...
The Federal Arts Projects were created by FDR in the summer of 1935. A year later, a handful of writers employed in the St Louis office of the Missouri Writers' Project, including Jack Balch, went out on strike. Lamps at High Noon is the only novel about this strike and the only one to treat comprehensively any aspect of the Federal Writers' Project, whose participants included some of the country's most accomplished and promising authors. Charlie Gest, the wide-eyed and well-intentioned protagonist of the novel, confronts firsthand the project's sometimes underhanded efforts to monitor the...
The Federal Arts Projects were created by FDR in the summer of 1935. A year later, a handful of writers employed in the St Louis office of the Missour...
