The author recalls his poverty-stricken youth in Alabama in the 1960s and 70s, focusing on the extraordinary efforts of his mother to protect her sons from the violence of their father, a man scarred by war, and telling of the sacrifices she made so her children could have a better life.

Upton Sinclair's dramatic and deeply moving story exposed the brutal conditions in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the nineteenth century and brought into sharp moral focus the apalling odds against which immigrants and other working people struggled for their share of the American dream. Denounced by the conservative press as an un-American libel on the meatpacking industry, the book was championed by more progressive thinkers, including then...

"A history of the class system in America from the colonial era to the present illuminates the crucial legacy of the underprivileged white demographic, citing the pivotal contributions of lower-class white workers in wartime, social policy, and the rise of the Republican Party,"--NoveList.

The lives of middle-aged women struggling with jobs and family, friendship and romance, are captured to perfection in this collection of humorous and touching stories set in the contemporary Southwest. Mary Sojourner writes about hardworking, hard-living, blue-collar women who fight quietly and fiercely to make their way in the world, find love and beauty, and hold on to their hopes. The heroines, most of them over forty, include single moms, aging...

The Dolans live by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for day work at crooked job agencies. Rye yearns for a steady job and a home; his older brother, Gig, dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment. Enter Ursula the Great, a vaudeville singer who performs with a live cougar and introduces the brothers to a far more dangerous creature: a mining magnate determined to keep his wealth...

A young man from a blue collar family struggles against the odds to fulfill his childhood dream of attending the University of Notre Dame and playing football for the Fighting Irish.

Presents the life of Robert Peace, an African American who became a brillant biochemistry student at Yale University, but after graduation lived as drug dealer and was brutally murdered at the age of thirty.