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"Vance, a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, provides an account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like...
2) Martin Eden
Author
Description
Recounts the story of Martin Eden, a young seaman struggling to obtain social and intellectual recognition as a writer.
3) The jungle
Author
Series
Appears on list
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A documentary novel portraying industry's conditions at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. Sinclair's novel prompted public outrage which led President Theodore Roosevelt to demand an official investigation. This eventually led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug laws.
Author
Pub. Date
c1998
Description
The Valley of the Moon (1913) is a novel by American writer Jack London. Inspired by his experiences as a working-class man and dedicated socialist, London incorporates aspects of his own biography-his interest in sailing, his life on a ranch in Sonoma County-to tell a story of hardship, hope, and perseverance. Having grown disillusioned with the labor movement, London uses the novel to advocate for sustainable agriculture and other alternatives to...
5) Empire Falls
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Appears on these lists
Description
There is a protagonist: forty-something Miles Roby, proprietor of the local greasy spoon and the recently divorced father of a teenage daughter. We meet his ex-wife Janine, his father Max, and a host of Empire Grill regulars. To further complicate things, Miles's brother, David, is suspected of dealing marijuana.
Author
Description
"D.H. Lawrence's most widely read novel and one of the great works of twentieth-century literature, Sons and Lovers is now printed in full for the first time. In 1913, at the time of its first publication, Lawrence reluctantly agreed to the removal of no fewer than eighty passages which until now have never been restored. Here at last is the novel in the form that Lawrence himself wanted - a tenth longer than the incomplete and expurgated version...
8) Empire Falls
Pub. Date
[2005]
Description
A powerful portrait of blue-collar America, a timeless tribute to the inherent decency and good humor that sustains working-class people in everyday life.
10) Scrapper
Pub. Date
[2023]
Description
A vibrant and inventive father-daughter comedy follows Georgie, a resourceful twelve-year-old girl who secretly lives alone in her flat in a working-class suburb of London following the death of her mother. She makes money stealing bikes with her best friend Ali and keeps the social workers off her back by pretending to live with an uncle. Out of nowhere, her estranged father Jason arrives and forces her to confront reality. Uninterested in this sudden...
Author
Formats
Description
In this book, Nancy Isenberg reveals that the wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlements to today's hillbillies. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early nineteenth century and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise...
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"Douglas Stuart's first novel Shuggie Bain is one of the most successful literary debuts of the century so far. It was awarded the 2020 Booker Prize, and is now published or forthcoming in forty territories, having already sold more than a million copies worldwide. Now Stuart returns with Young Mungo, his extraordinary second novel. Five years in the writing, it is both a page-turner and literary tour de force, a vivid portrayal of working-class...
Author
Description
"Orphans Gig and Rye Dolan don't have a penny to their names. The brothers work grueling, odd jobs each day just to secure a meal, and spend nights sleeping wherever they can with other day laborers. Twenty-three-year-old Gig is a passionate union man, fighting for fair pay and calling out the corrupt employers who exploit the working class. Eager to emulate his older brother, Rye follows suit, though he can't quite muster Gig's passion for the cause....
Author
Formats
Description
"Mike MuÃأoz is a young Mexican American not too many years out of high school--and just fired from his latest gig as a lawn boy on a landscaping crew. Though he tries time and again to get his foot on the first rung of that ladder to success, he can't seem to get a break. But then things start to change for Mike, and after a raucous, jarring, and challenging trip, he finds he can finally see the future and his place in it."--
Author
Series
Maisie Dobbs novels volume 9
Description
Early April 1933. To the costermongers of Covent Garden - sellers of fruit and vegetables on the streets of London - Eddie Pettit was a gentle soul with a near-magical gift for working with horses. When Eddie is killed in a violent accident, the grieving costers are deeply skeptical about the cause of his death. Who would want to kill Eddie and why?
18) The silent lady
Author
Description
When an unkempt woman who is barely able to speak arrives in his office, London attorney Alexander Armstrong is stunned to discover that she is Irene Baindor, a woman who holds the key to solving a mystery that has plagued him for twenty-six years.
Author
Pub. Date
[2020]
Description
"After sixteen novels, Jacqueline Winspear has taken the bold step of turning to memoir, revealing the hardships and joys of her family history. Both shockingly frank and deftly restrained, her memoir tackles such difficult, poignant, and fascinating family memories as her paternal grandfather's shellshock, her mother's evacuation from London during the Blitz; her soft-spoken animal-loving father's torturous assignment to an explosives team during...
Author
Description
A haunting memoir about growing up dirt-poor in the Alabama hills--and about moving on but never really being able to leave. The extraordinary gifts for evocation and insight and the stunning talent for story- telling that earned Rick Bragg a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1996 are here brought to bear on the wrenching story of his own family's life. It is the story of a war-haunted, hard-drinking father and a strong-willed, loving mother who...