Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel

by Wallace Stegner

He was no soapboxer, anyway, and it was the soapboxers who dared town authorities in the free-speech fights. He was another kind of organizer: a singer, a player of the piano at local meetings, a maker of catchy rhymes and drawer of cartoons. The name of Joe Hill was better known than the man, for it was signed to cartoons pinned up in almost every hall up and down the coast, and his songs in the Little Red Songbook were the kind that men in a crowd discovered they knew. Any time, at any season, he was likely to drop quietly into town, spend a day or two or three, help out with a meeting, get out and work the waterfront or the bunkhouses, and disappear again, leaving behind a cartoon on the back of a laundry ticket, or a song written in a round neat hand that would next year be printed in the songbook but would be known by hundreds of Wobblies before it ever appeared. He was seen in Spokane, Seattle, Portland, Frisco, Fresno, San Pedro, San Diego, Tia Juana, out in the islands, a silent and almost diffident man. He looked like a man who nursed a grudge, but he was quiet, well spoken, a good jungle cook, full of unexpected sarcasms and humorous remarks. But a man who never led with his tongue; a counterpuncher strictly. At parties he sometimes seemed to want to mix and to be held back and stiffened by some incurable reserve. A singleton, a loner, a man with a hot temper and no really close friends. But a rebel from his skin inwards, with an absolute faith in the One Big Uni...