Blood on the forge
By: William Attaway.
Series: New York Review Books classics
Publisher: New York Review Books; Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West
Published: 2005
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 237
Subjects: African American iron and steel workers -- Fiction.; Iron and steel workers -- Fiction.; African American men -- Fiction.; Migration, Internal -- Fiction.; Brothers -- Fiction.; Pittsburgh (Pa.) -- Fiction.
Genres: Fiction.
Description: 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 as an icon of hope but as an instrument of destruction.
Notes: Originally published: Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1941.