Labor's Text: The Worker in American Fiction

by Laura Hapke

Labor's Text charts how the worker has been portrayed and often misrepresented in American fiction. Laura Hapke offers hundreds of depictions of wage from fiction on the early artisan "aristocrats" to the Gilded Age's union-busting novelists to the year 2000's marginalized, apolitical men and women. Whether the authors discussed are pro- or anti-labor, Hapke illuminates the literary, historical, and intellectual contexts in which their fiction was produced and read.

Paperback

First published February 1, 2000

Reviews

[Matt Buongiovanni · Rating 4 out of 5]

“If American history teaches us anything, it is that our fiction cannot bear too much proletarian reality. With each new decade, workers change less than the narratives that represent them. In a nation that too often denigrates or masks workers’ achievements, a century and a half of fiction about working people has fixed a restless, often flickering gaze on labor’s enduring struggles.”

Continuing with the trend of shorter reviews while I’m on vacation: An excellent survey of American literature’s often fraught relationship with labor. This book, written around the turn of the century, does not end on a particularly happy note, as you may be able to guess from the subject matter, but Hapke’s writing is clear throughout, and her unflinching dedication to assessing the state of American labor the writing that discusses it is carried by her clear passion for the subject. This was a wonderfully informative read.

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

A longish book that explains how labor has been portrayed in fiction writing. It is divided into chronological sections beginning with antebellum writings and continuing through to the present. For each section the author provides a historical context and then discusses the major labor writers of the period. However, it is sometimes confusing reading because she intersperses fact and fiction, and it sometimes isn't clear which work of fiction she is writing about. Though it has these minor faults it is an excellent introduction into the portrayal in fiction of the American worker be they female or male, immigrant or native born, red, white, black, or yellow.