Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel

by Wallace Stegner

Who can determine how much a man imposes his own myth of himself upon others and how much that myth is created by those who know him? Joe Hill began to be born in his songs and cartoons; certainly he lived, imperfectly realized, in the mind of a Swede sailor sitting on the San Pedro waterfront feeding a rat, or looking down the sad trough of Beacon Street and dreaming a dream of leading thousands. But now he acquires stature and outline through the labors of a committee; he is issued from a headquarters like news bulletins, and the headquarters is not Salt Lake County jail but the IWW hall. Step by step, as the union fights his case against the hardening prejudices of courts and public, in an atmosphere increasingly edged and hostile, the character of Joe Hill is filled in by broadsides, pamphlets, appeals, form letters, news stories for the labor press. He emanates piecemeal from a dusty bare room where transient men sleep and cook and discuss and convene: a meager flophouse, a minimal lodge, a scanty asylum, a threadbare club, a primitive church whose symbol is the clenched fist of solidarity. It is in this cell of the new society forming within the shell of the old, this skimpy few square feet of the revolutionary future, that Joe Hill is properly born. Throughout the course of his creation his prototype Joe Hillstrom sits waiting in the county jail. Forbidden newspapers, he can be only vaguely aware of what is happening to his identity. The little information he gets c...