This brutally gripping novel about the African-American Great Migration follows the three Moss brothers, who flee the rural South to work in industries up North. Delivered by day into the searing inferno of the steel mills, by night they encounter a world of surreal devastation, crowded with dogfighters, whores, cripples, strikers, and scabs. Keenly sensitive to character, prophetic in its depiction of environmental degradation and globalized labor, Attaway's novel is an unprecedneted confrontation with the realities of American life, offering an apocalyptic vision of the melting pot not...

2017 Reprint of 1939 Edition.  Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software.  William Attaway is best known for his novel Blood on the Forge (1941), a novel with black characters about migration to the industrial North.  Let Me Breathe Thunder shares many of the themes of proletarian struggle and economic determinism demonstrated in his later work.  Let Me Breathe Thunder is a simply told story of migrant workers on the road caught in a predetermined universe of tragic proportions. Naturalistic in...