Worker-writer in America
Worker-writer in America

Author: Douglas Wixson

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 724

ISBN-13: 9780252067853

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Conroy, a coal miner's son who apprenticed at age thirteen in a railroad shop, later migrated to factory cities and experienced the privation and labor struggles of the 1930s. As worker and writer he composed The Disinherited, one of the most important working-class novels of the thirties. As editor of a radical literary journal, The Anvil, he nurtured the early careers of Richard Wright, Nelson Algren, and Meridel LeSueur before his own literary work was eclipsed in the cold war years. Douglas Wixson draws upon a wealth of letters and manuscripts made available to him as Conroy's literary executor, as well as numerous interviews with Conroy and his former contributors and colleagues. Wixson explores the origins and development of worker-writing and the numerous "little magazines" it generated. He examines the differences between the midwestern and East Coast literary worlds and the milieu in which Conroy and others like him worked - the Depression, job layoffs, factory closings, homelessness, and migration.

Nickel and Dimed
Nickel and Dimed

Author: Barbara Ehrenreich

Publisher: Metropolitan Books

Published: 2010-04-01

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1429926643

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The New York Times bestselling work of undercover reportage from our sharpest and most original social critic, with a new foreword by Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job—any job—can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly "unskilled," that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you int to live indoors. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity—a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich's perspective and for a rare view of how "prosperity" looks from the bottom. And now, in a new foreword, Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, explains why, twenty years on in America, Nickel and Dimed is more relevant than ever.

They Seek a City
They Seek a City

Author: Arna Bontemps

Publisher:

Published: 1945

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13:

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"They Seek a City" is a landmark text documenting Black flight from the South to points north and west. Historical figures include George Washington Bush, an early settler south of Olympia, Washington Territory, William Gross, the pioneer Seattle restaurateur and hotelier, and Spokane publisher Horace Roscoe Cayton.

The Once and Future Worker
The Once and Future Worker

Author: Oren Cass

Publisher: Encounter Books

Published: 2018-11-13

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 1641770155

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“[Cass’s] core principle—a culture of respect for work of all kinds—can help close the gap dividing the two Americas....” – William A. Galston, The Brookings Institution The American worker is in crisis. Wages have stagnated for more than a generation. Reliance on welfare programs has surged. Life expectancy is falling as substance abuse and obesity rates climb. These woes are not the inevitable result of irresistible global and technological forces. They are the direct consequence of a decades-long economic consensus that prioritized increasing consumption—regardless of the costs to American workers, their families, and their communities. Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency focused attention on the depth of the nation’s challenges, yet while everyone agrees something must change, the Left’s insistence on still more government spending and the Right’s faith in still more economic growth are recipes for repeating the mistakes of the past. In this groundbreaking re-evaluation of American society, economics, and public policy, Oren Cass challenges our basic assumptions about what prosperity means and where it comes from to reveal how we lost our way. The good news is that we can still turn things around—if the nation’s proverbial elites are willing to put the American worker’s interests first. Which is more important, pristine air quality, or well-paying jobs that support families? Unfettered access to the cheapest labor in the world, or renewed investment in the employment of Americans? Smoothing the path through college for the best students, or ensuring that every student acquires the skills to succeed in the modern economy? Cutting taxes, expanding the safety net, or adding money to low-wage paychecks? The renewal of work in America demands new answers to these questions. If we reinforce their vital role, workers supporting strong families and communities can provide the foundation for a thriving, self-sufficient society that offers opportunity to all.

More or Less Dead
More or Less Dead

Author: Alice Driver

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2015-03-26

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 0816531161

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In Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, people disappear, their bodies dumped in deserted city lots or jettisoned in the unforgiving desert. All too many of them are women. More or Less Dead analyzes how such violence against women has been represented in news media, books, films, photography, and art. Alice Driver argues that the various cultural reports often express anxiety or criticism about how women traverse and inhabit the geography of Ciudad Juárez and further the idea of the public female body as hypersexualized. Rather than searching for justice, the various media—art, photography, and even graffiti—often reuse victimized bodies in sensationalist, attention-grabbing ways. In order to counteract such views, local activists mark the city with graffiti and memorials that create a living memory of the violence and try to humanize the victims of these crimes. The phrase “more or less dead” was coined by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño in his novel 2666, a penetrating fictional study of Juárez. Driver explains that victims are “more or less dead” because their bodies are never found or aren’t properly identified, leaving families with an uncertainty lasting for decades—or forever. The author’s clear, precise journalistic style tackles the ethics of representing feminicide victims in Ciudad Juárez. Making a distinction between the words “femicide” (the murder of girls or women) and “feminicide” (murder as a gender-driven event), one of her interviewees says, “Women are killed for being women, and they are victims of masculine violence because they are women. It is a crime of hate against the female gender. These are crimes of power.”

Workers on Arrival
Workers on Arrival

Author: Joe William Trotter

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2021-01-19

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0520377516

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"An eloquent and essential correction to contemporary discussions of the American working class."—The Nation From the ongoing issues of poverty, health, housing, and employment to the recent upsurge of lethal police-community relations, the black working class stands at the center of perceptions of social and racial conflict today. Journalists and public policy analysts often discuss the black poor as “consumers” rather than “producers,” as “takers” rather than “givers,” and as “liabilities” instead of “assets.” In his engrossing history, Workers on Arrival, Joe William Trotter, Jr., refutes these perceptions by charting the black working class’s vast contributions to the making of America. Covering the last four hundred years since Africans were first brought to Virginia in 1619, Trotter traces the complicated journey of black workers from the transatlantic slave trade to the demise of the industrial order in the twenty-first century. At the center of this compelling, fast-paced narrative are the actual experiences of these African American men and women. A dynamic and vital history of remarkable contributions despite repeated setbacks, Workers on Arrival expands our understanding of America’s economic and industrial growth, its cities, ideas, and institutions, and the real challenges confronting black urban communities today.

Ireland, Irish America, and Work
Ireland, Irish America, and Work

Author: Amy L. May

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2019-01-18

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1527526437

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This volume offers perspectives on the history of labour in Ireland, as well as on Irish-American labor, particularly since the mass emigration prompted by the famine of the 1840s. It also examines the specific role that the Irish played in the Inland Northwest, as well as the intersections between the concerns of the Irish and Irish-Americans and those of the Spokane and Coeur d’Alene Indians who inhabited the region when European immigrants first arrived. It relies for its theoretical foundations on labour, postcolonial and feminist theory.

Nelson Algren
Nelson Algren

Author: Richard F. Bales

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2024-11-07

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 1476694907

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This book addresses critical gaps in existing biographies of Nelson Algren, providing new perspectives on his writing style, literary contributions, professional colleagues, and personal life--especially his relationship with Simone de Beauvoir. Although Beauvoir maintained a simultaneous relationship with philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, the correspondence exchanged between Beauvoir, Algren, and Sartre, as this book discusses, sheds new light on her "transatlantic love affair" with Algren. Moreover, this work challenges the assertion that Algren's writing aligns seamlessly with the "New Journalism" style popularized by Tom Wolfe. It investigates how Algren's literary legacy might have diverged had he embraced more of the principles associated with New Journalism.

Writers and Miners
Writers and Miners

Author: David C. Duke

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2014-07-11

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0813148219

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Coal miners evoke admiration and sympathy from the public, and writers—some seeking a muse, others a cause—traditionally champion them. David C. Duke explores more than one hundred years of this tradition in literature, poetry, drama, and film. Duke argues that as most writers spoke about rather than to the mining community, miners became stock characters in an industrial morality play, robbed of individuality or humanity. He discusses activist-writers such as John Reed, Theodore Dreiser, and Denise Giardina, who assisted striking workers, and looks at the writing of miners themselves. He examines portrayals of miners from The Trail of the Lonesome Pine to Matewan and The Kentucky Cycle. The most comprehensive study on the subject to date, Writers and Miners investigates the vexed political and creative relationship between activists and artists and those they seek to represent.

A World to Win
A World to Win

Author: Jack Conroy

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 9780252069277

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"Written in the full heat of the Great Depression, Jack Conroy'sA World to Winbears the marks of the labor struggles and union strikes he witnessed in the early 1930s. Like Dickens, Conroy evokes compassion and warmth for his absurd, comic, tragic characters through caricature, using parody to extract humor from their gray, circumscribed lives.Set in St. Louis, the narrative centers on Leo and Robert Hurley, two half brothers who are divided by education and aspirations. Leo is an unlikely proletarian hero who finally gains political consciousness in spite of himself. Robert has literary pretensions (but little talent) and a head clogged with scraps of genteel romance and Victorian poetry. As Leo and Robert grope toward reconciliation, they come into contact with hybrids of artistic milieus, radical politics, and labor activism that were particular to the Popular Front era.The introduction by Douglas Wixson shows how Conroy's writing is embedded in his experiences and also how his flawless ear for language shapes both form and character in the novel. Moving readers from a sentimentalized concern for the poor to a more concrete contemplation of the social and political conditions that characterize their lives,A World to Winserves as a reminder of the continuing importance of a dedication, like Conroy's, to giving voice to the voiceless."