Ruth McKenney's compelling novel of class and industrial conflict in Akron, Ohio, first appeared in 1939 and was widely acclaimed. McKenney was a capable journalist who had spent a year and a half in Akron, the heart of the tire industry, a city that she said "smells like a rubber band smoldering in an ashtray."

Industrial Valley vividly portrays an industrial city crippled by the country's economic failures and also provides a stirring example of fiction predicated on social and political principles. It will intrigue readers for its contemporary as well as its historical...