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A World to Win
A miner’s son who apprenticed at age thirteen in a railroad car shop, Jack Conroy became a powerful spokesman for the industrial proletariat and an exponent of worker-writing, a literature of rough-hewn vigor and social content developed by radical writers in the 1930s. A World to Win combines the eccentric characters and linguistic oddities Conroy knew from his years as an industrial worker with a narrative that portrays the labor struggles and union strikes he witnessed in the early years of the Great Depression.
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, A World to Win centers on two half brothers, Leo and Robert Hurley. Leo is an unlikely proletarian hero who acquires political consciousness in spite of himself; Robert is a victim of his own confused literary pretensions. As they grope toward reconciliation, they come into contact with bohemians and radicals who engaged in labor activism during the Popular Front era.
An important milepost in the development of worker-writing, A World to Win steers readers away from a sentimentalized concern for the poor to a more concrete contemplation of the social and political conditions that characterize their lives.
—from the back cover
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 Win serves as a reminder of the continuing importance of a dedication, like Conroy's, to giving voice to the voiceless.
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, A World to Win centers on two half brothers, Leo and Robert Hurley. Leo is an unlikely proletarian hero who acquires political consciousness in spite of himself; Robert is a victim of his own confused literary pretensions. As they grope toward reconciliation, they come into contact with bohemians and radicals who engaged in labor activism during the Popular Front era.
An important milepost in the development of worker-writing, A World to Win steers readers away from a sentimentalized concern for the poor to a more concrete contemplation of the social and political conditions that characterize their lives.
—from the back cover
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 Win serves as a reminder of the continuing importance of a dedication, like Conroy's, to giving voice to the voiceless.
- GenresFiction
348 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1935
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