"Work can be epic. I want to glorify work, will, devotion, all that makes man great." So wrote Hugo of Toilers of the Sea, his novel about the rescue of a shipwrecked engine by a lonely visionary named Gilliatt. Armed with nothing but primitive tools and a tremendous inventiveness, Gilliatt engages in sublime combat with tempests, starvation and the madness of solitude. - From the Introduction and Afterword by Shoshana Milgram Knapp