The Friendly Road: New Adventures in Contentment by David Grayson

Ho-hum escapades of a hobo hobbyist

The Friendly Road, a book by David Grayson, was published in 1912. David Grayson was a pseudonym used by Ray Stannard Baker, an American journalist and writer of nonfiction in the muckraking style of social justice exposé. Under the pen name of Grayson, he published several lighter and fluffier books. The first was Adventures in Contentment (1907), about life on a farm. The Friendly Road is the second Grayson book, hence its subtitle New Adventures in Contentment. The Friendly Road is written as if it were a first-person nonfiction memoir, but then again, David Grayson isn’t a real person, and many of the happenings in the book seem contrived and not very realistic. This is more of a work of semiautobiographical fiction, and it falls somewhere between a novel and a collection of short stories.

Grayson owns a farm, whereabouts unknown. All the names of cities and towns in the book are fictional, so you never know where the story is taking place, just somewhere in America. (Baker lived in Amherst, Massachusetts.) Grayson decides he wants to take a break from his farm and strike out on the road to dabble in the life of a tramp. He carries very few possessions and soon spends all of the money in his pockets. Over the course of his journey, he lives off of the kindness of strangers. In a typical chapter, he encounters someone along the road. He sees them working and decides to pitch in and help, uninvited. He asks for no compensation, but there’s always hope that he’ll be offered a meal and a place to sleep for a night or two. There’s no real purpose to Grayson’s journey other than wanderlust and the possibility of making new friends. Grayson wants to make friends with everyone and thinks everyone wants to make friends with him.

I can sympathize with Grayson’s wanderlust, and I generally enjoy reading books about this unfettered, wandering lifestyle. What I don’t like about The Friendly Road, however, is how Grayson constantly reminds the reader that he’s bestowing sage wisdom upon you. He’s extremely satisfied with his own sense of humor and flaunts a know-it-all confidence in his discovery of the secret meaning of life. His revelations, however, are not particularly surprising. What is the key to a happy life? No responsibilities. Duh. Nice (non)work if you can get it, but Grayson’s rosy pictures of pointless wanderlust don’t really stand up to his own moral sermonizing. If everyone lived their life this way, would the world be a better place? Nope. It’s important to note that when Grayson leaves home and strikes out on the road, he leaves behind a woman whom you assume is his wife. She, or someone else, is left responsible for the farm from which he’s fled.

The Friendly Road improves a little in its second half when Grayson encounters a socialist and gets involved in a labor struggle. Baker slips into muckraking mode for a while, and you at least get some sense of historical events that were going on at the time. Still, his insight into the class struggle is a lot shallower and tamer than contemporaries like Jack London or Upton Sinclair. Grayson is neither for nor against socialism. He won’t commit to either side. He just wants everyone to get along.

There are many better books on hobos, tramps, and drifters. In fiction, there are classics like Knut Hamsun’s Wanderer trilogy (1906–1912), B. Traven’s The Cotton-Pickers (1926), John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937), Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), and William Kennedy’s Ironweed (1983), just for starters. In nonfiction, Jack London’s The Road (1907) and John Krakauer’s Into the Wild (1996) are both excellent. With so many other superior choices, why bother with Grayson’s tepid chicken soup for the soul?

A Dream of John Ball by William Morris

Renaissance fair socialism

William Morris (1834–1896) was an English author, visual artist, textile designer, and socialist agitator. As the most prominent artist in the British Arts and Crafts movement, Morris created drawings, paintings, book illustrations, fabrics, furniture, and stained glass windows that harkened back to the Middle Ages. He was also a rather prolific man of letters, and his literary works, not surprisingly, were likewise often set in medieval times. His novel A Dream of John Ball was published in 1888.

The narrator of the novel is a present-day Englishman of the 1880s who falls asleep and dreams himself back into the Middle Ages. Specifically, he finds himself amid the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, a rebellion that swept across large portions of England. Serfs fighting for the right to own property and be their own masters rose up in arms against the regime of King Richard II. The narrator falls into a band of such rebels in County Kent. The inspirational leader of this cadre of freedom fighters is John Ball, a real-life clergyman whom Morris portrays as a sort of Robin Hood figure. Jack Straw, another historical figure from the revolt, also appears in the novel.

After quickly being accepted into this band of rebels, the narrator fights along side them in an encounter with the king’s forces. In this battle that takes up roughly the first half of the novel, Morris indulges his ardor for medieval culture, lovingly describing in vivid detail all the garments, weaponry, and accoutrements of these 14th-century warriors. This extended action sequence reads like a few chapters disembodied from Ivanhoe or some other Sir Walter Scott novel. There’s much medieval pageantry and heroic derring-do but not much of a story. Morris emphasizes the fellowship between these daring and forthright men while implying that such fellowship no longer exists in the modern world. In Morris’s eyes, this picturesque world of medieval farmers and craftsmen would have been an idyllic utopia, were it not for the oppression they endured under feudalism.

The second half of the novel is an improvement over the first. When the narrator finally sits down to talk to John Ball, the story actually goes somewhere and has a purpose. Ball can somehow sense that his conversation partner is a visitor from the future. He asks the narrator if his dream of equality and brotherhood of man will ever come to fruition. The narrator regrettably informs Ball that although serfdom and feudalism would cease to exist in England, men will still be bound as wage-slaves within an oppressive system run by greedy oligarchs. Although much has changed in half a millennium, the ultimate status of the common man has changed little. He proceeds to explain capitalism in lingo evocative of the Middle Ages, with many thees and thous and the use of antiquated words like “villeins” and “thralls” instead of “serfs” or “proletariats.” The Peasant’s Revolt is regarded by some radicals as an inspirational prototype (albeit unsuccessful) for a socialist revolution. While there is no hope for John Ball’s rebels, Morris encourages readers of 1888 to hold out hope for an overthrow of the oligarchy and freedom for the common man.

Morris is regarded as a pioneer of the science fiction and fantasy genres in English literature. A Dream of John Ball is merely a baby step in that direction. The only science fiction element is the time travel, which takes place in a dream and therefore could just be the narrator’s imagination. A couple years after this novel, Morris would write a more overtly sci-fi and more overtly socialist work, News from Nowhere, which is superior to A Dream of John Ball in just about every way I can think of. Nevertheless, the second half of A Dream of John Ball is well-conceived, eloquently executed, and daringly outspoken for its time.

The Devil’s Paw by E. Phillips Oppenheim

World War I spy plot with anti-Red sermonizing

E. Phillips Oppenheim (1866–1946) was a very successful author of fiction involving espionage, intrigue, mystery, and crime. From 1887 to 1943, he published over 100 novels. The Great Impersonation (1920) is generally regarded as his best work. Other than that, I couldn’t tell you which of his books are supposed to be good or bad. When I’m in the mood for some Oppenheim, I just pick one at random, based on title. The Devil’s Paw, also published in 1920, is the ninth Oppenheim novel that I’ve read thus far.

Two friends sit before the fire in a hunting cottage near the coast of Norfolk, England. The owner of said cottage is Miles Furley, a parliamentary representative for the Labor Party. Julian Orden is a wealthy aristocrat who lives at his parents’ palatial estate nearby. Mommy and Daddy Orden host a who’s who of aristocrats at their mansion. Among the frequent house guests is the current Prime Minister of England. The year is 1917 or 1918. World War I is underway, and the Americans have joined the fight. Part of Furley’s wartime duties as a coastal landowner is to patrol the shoreline looking for suspicious activity. This evening, however, he injures his leg and asks Orden to cover his shift. While making his rounds on the beach, Orden spies a mysterious figure picking up a canister from the surf, presumably containing a message from a German submarine. Before he can make a move to intercept the spy, however, Orden is struck on the head and knocked unconscious. The next day, he finds evidence that one of his parents’ party guests, a beautiful Russian woman, may be involved in the treasonous act he witnessed on the beach. 

I’ve never been blown away by an Oppenheim novel, but I generally find them moderately entertaining. I wanted to like The Devil’s Paw, but this story kept letting me down. The plot here involves socialists. Rather than proletariats, however, most of the would-be radicals depicted here are wealthy, paternalistic socialists. Oppenheim isn’t really interested in people who work for a living. He thinks that aristocrats are the only people worth writing about, and the only people capable of running the world. Here he pays lip service to the cause of socialism and labor, but one never really gets the feeling that his heart is in it. Orden, the hero of the novel, was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and just happens to dabble in labor politics. The villain is the guy who wears shabby clothes and doesn’t like opera. The result is a jingoistic propaganda piece in which socialism is portrayed as a scam and pacifism is portrayed as evil.

Although this book was published between the two World Wars, Oppenheim’s fiction is still very much stuck in the Victorian Era of the 1880s or ‘90s. One annoying convention from that age is the idea that women can commit no evil. In Oppenheim’s world, the most heinous crime a man can commit is treason, but if the perpetrator is a beautiful, upper-class female, the gentlemanly thing to do is look the other way. (Of course, if she’s of the servant class, she could be shot or hanged for espionage, no problem.) Oppenheim also tries hard to create some sexual tension between his male and female leads, but that’s awfully hard to do when his characters and intended audience are stuck in an idealized gentility wherein you can’t even kiss someone without being willing to back it up with a wedding ring.

If you know anything about history, you know how the spy plot is going to turn out. Oppenheim can’t change the outcome of the Great War. Thus, the only possible thrills would have to come from having the characters threatened with peril. There’s surprisingly little danger in this thriller, however. It mostly reads like a series of political debates, the outcome of which is a foregone conclusion, given Oppenheim’s monarchical bent. Oppenheim should’ve stuck to writing novels about the rich and powerful and left the socialists out of it. He’s clearly out of his element here.

The Metropolis by Upton Sinclair

Lifestyles of the rich and stupid

The Metropolis, a novel by Upton Sinclair, was published in 1908, just a couple years after his controversial breakthrough book The Jungle. The two novels are written in a similar muckraking, pro-socialist style, but The Jungle is much more eye-opening, compelling, and insightful than this tepid successor. By comparison, The Metropolis feels shallow and poorly thought-out.

Allan Montague is a lawyer born and raised in Mississippi. Despite his Southern upbringing, his father fought in the Civil War on the side of the Union. After Dad’s death, Allan moves to New York City, along with his mother and cousin Alice. Allan hopes that, through his deceased father’s connections, he can find some profitable work in the big city. Allan’s younger brother Oliver already resides in New York. He lives the life of a wealthy man, but it is unclear what exactly he does for a living. Oliver is active in high society, and he introduces Allan, Alice, and Mom into his high-dollar social circles. The Montagues attend a series of lengthy and lavish parties in which no frivolous expense is spared. The hosts of these parties expend enormous amounts of money in an attempt to outdo one another. It’s unclear why exactly these millionaires would welcome the Montagues into their circle, since the family from Mississippi are merely upper middle class. Nevertheless, Allan Montague is the reasonable man through whose eyes we view the outrageously extravagant lifestyles of these kings and queens of New York society. 

The bulk of this book is just Sinclair rattling off examples of insane things the rich spend their money on, and how much those luxuries cost. This goes on for chapter after chapter. For example, a woman had a million-dollar coat that was made from the feathers of rare Hawaiian birds. Is this really the problem that’s plaguing American society? Not until Chapter 11, when Allan is hired as a lawyer to work on a lawsuit, does some semblance of a story actually begin. That plot thread, however, barely goes anywhere. If Theodore Dreiser wrote this novel, he would concentrate on the business, legal, and financial aspects of the story, perhaps to the point of inducing boredom. Sinclair, on the other hand, rushes through the legal case rather sketchily because he just wants to rant about the rich. He succeeds in getting his point across that the wealthy waste a lot of their money on stupid and useless stuff. There is a brief passage on the idiocy of fashion that’s rather well-said, but then Sinclair just resumes his catalog of expensive oddities: “There was a woman who had her teeth filled with diamonds; and another who was driving a pair of zebras,” and so on and so on.

Sinclair never acknowledges the fact that all this expenditure of wealth might trickle down to the artisans who make these luxuries, the merchants who sell them, and the servants who clean and maintain them. He will try to shock you with the fact that a rich old woman employs 32 servants, but that’s 32 people who have jobs. (I’m a liberal, and I’m making these arguments. That’s how annoying this novel is.) Sinclair’s typical modus operandi would be to contrast his exaggerated rich people with some exaggerated poor people­—i.e. look at what the wealthy are doing while these workers starve—but in this book he never gets around to the poor people, other than a few brief comments the aristocrats make about labor strikes. Sinclair is too busy reciting all these Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not examples of extreme wealth and waste.

In general, I like Sinclair’s work (The Jungle is a masterpiece, in my opinion), but at times he can get carried away with his exaggerated black-and-white socioeconomic rhetoric to the point of campiness. Such is the case with The Metropolis, and it’s not even fun.

Oil! by Upton Sinclair

The prototype for Lanny Budd

Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! was published in 1927. It takes place in Southern California, amid fictional towns with names like Angel City and Beach City. The story opens somewhere around 1910. J. Arnold Ross, a former mule driver, has struck it rich as a self-made oil tycoon. He travels around California buying up land and drilling exploratory wells, some of which have paid off quite handsomely. Accompanying him on his business trips is his young son, J. Arnold Ross Jr., nicknamed Bunny. As he grows into manhood, Bunny enjoys the wealthy lifestyle made possible by Dad’s profits, but he doesn’t understand why the laborers who make such profits possible are often forced to live less fortunate lives and endure relative poverty and dangerous occupational hazards. When the oil workers strike against Dad’s company, Bunny finds himself advocating for the workers’ rights. As the story progresses through World War I, the Harding and Coolidge administrations, and the Teapot Dome scandal, Bunny’s personal values grow more and more anti-capitalist, and he becomes a more active ally of the socialist movement in America.

In recent years, Oil! has enjoyed some resurgence of attention because it is the book upon which the film There Will Be Blood is based. There’s very little similarity between that movie and this novel, however, other than they both deal with the oil business during the same time period.

Anyone who has read any of the novels in Sinclair’s Lanny Budd series will be struck by the close resemblance between Oil! and the eleven novels in that series. All are written in exactly the same style. Although dealing with serious subject matter like war, poverty, and labor unrest, the tone of the writing in both cases is oddly breezy and light-hearted, with a somewhat sarcastic humor. Bunny, for all intents and purposes, is Lanny Budd, except that instead of a European playboy, Bunny’s a Californian. Both characters are wealthy young men with wealthy fathers who, despite their high class status, learn to sympathize with the socialist cause. Their leftist ideals clash with those of their more conservative fathers. Lanny and Bunny even have similar love lives, and both become annoyingly involved in séances and mediums, allowing Sinclair to indulge his pet paranormal interest of spiritualism (communication with the dead).

In both cases, Dad’s job and wealth allows the son to mingle with all kinds of important personages. The Lanny Budd series uses real famous people, but almost all of the politicians, movie stars, and tycoons in Oil! are fictitious. Sinclair supplies supporting characters representing all levels of social status and class hierarchy in order to explore events and issues of the period, thus compiling a fictional narrative loaded with “people’s history” in the vein of Howard Zinn. To that end, however, Oil! is less successful than any of the Lanny Budd novels because it’s less realistic in its conspiracy-theories and in its optimistic visions of a utopian socialist future. Sinclair spends many pages praising the Soviet Union to high heaven in this novel. Eventually, after Stalin’s atrocities became common knowledge, he would do some major back-pedaling in books like The Return of Lanny Budd (1953). Despite all of its exaggerations and meandering storytelling, however, like all of Sinclair’s books it nevertheless ends up being a valuable historical document of American culture at the time the story is set, albeit from a leftist perspective.

It’s hard to understand why Oil! is Sinclair’s second best-known book after The Jungle, since it certainly isn’t close to being his second-best book. The Lanny Budd series may be intimidating to those who don’t want to settle in for an 11-novel haul, but it is ultimately worth the effort. Having read about 30 of Sinclair’s books myself, I would also recommend Mountain City and 100%: The Story of a Patriot.

The Personal Equation by Eugene O‘Neill

The Hairy Ape lite

Eugene O’Neill

After having read several of Eugene O’Neill’s better-known plays, I became a fan of his writing and decided to set about reading his complete works. Doing so has led me to some rather obscure works of his, some unjustly obscure and some deservedly so. The Personal Equation, one such O’Neill rarity, falls somewhere between the two. Written in 1915 as a class project when O’Neill was at Harvard, The Personal Equation didn’t make it to the stage until over a century later, when the Provincetown Players performed the work in 2019. O’Neill himself wished for many of his earlier plays to remain forgotten, because they weren’t up to his later high standards, but The Personal Equation is certainly not the worst of his early efforts (the worst would likely be Welded, with Bread and Butter and Servitude close behind). Nevertheless, when O’Neill won the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature, it is unlikely that The Personal Equation factored into that decision.

The fact that The Personal Equation is an issue-driven play makes it more interesting than the romances and relationship dramas from O’Neill’s early career. This play deals with labor issues of the World War I era, which if nothing else lends some historical value to the drama. Tom Perkins is a member of the IWE—International Workers of the Earth—a thinly veiled surrogate for the real-life IWW—Industrial Workers of the World (nicknamed the Wobblies). While working clandestinely as a labor organizer and agitator, Tom has a day job working in the offices of the Ocean Steamship Company. He associates with a cell of other IWE activists, including his girlfriend Olga, with whom he cohabitates, a rather daring and progressive arrangement for an unmarried couple in those days. The IWE charges Tom with a dangerous mission to blow up the engines of the Ocean Steamship Company’s ship the SS San Francisco, in hopes that the action will inspire shipworkers to revolt in a general strike. Complicating matters, however, is the fact that Tom’s father, Thomas Perkins Sr., is the second engineer on that very same SS San Francisco and a loyal company man who loves his job, his ship, and his engines. Regardless, to prove his loyalty to the IWE, Tom accepts the sabotage mission.

Early in his adult life, O’Neill worked for several years on merchant marine vessels and joined the Marine Transport Workers Union of the IWW. The platform of the IWW was a mix of socialist, anarchist, and syndicalist principles. In The Personal Equation, O’Neill deliberately distances the fictional IWE from the “Socialists,” presumably meaning the Socialist Party of America. Though O’Neill may have been a member of the IWW, his depiction of the IWE in this play is not entirely positive. One gathers that he believed in the party line of the IWW, but he was disappointed with the management of the organization and its ineffectiveness in living up to its ideals. He also criticizes how the IWW and other leftist radicals abandoned their antiwar stance in the face of World War I jingoism.

Much of the first half of The Personal Equation is predictable, but the ending is rather cleverly unexpected. The premise of the play sets up some contrived scenes, particularly the father vs. son conflict, but if you think of this as political symbolism and don’t expect too much realism, one can appreciate the care and craft with which O’Neill constructed this drama to convey his intended message. Ultimately, however, The Personal Equation ends up feeling like a watered-down rough sketch for O’Neill’s later, greater, and much more powerful allegory of labor unrest and class struggle, The Hairy Ape. Still, if you are a fan of O’Neill’s work, and The Hairy Ape in particular, then The Personal Equation is a well-drawn rough sketch that’s worth a look.

Jimmie Higgins by Upton Sinclair

Socialism vs. militarism in World War I

Jimmie Higgins, yet another novel about Socialism by America’s most prolific muckraker Upton Sinclair, was published in 1919. In this book, Sinclair paints a picture of what it was like to be a Socialist during World War I. Socialists by definition are pacifists because they refuse to take up arms against their brother workers of other nations. In this time of extreme militaristic jingoism, not only were Socialists persecuted for their beliefs by so-called American “patriots,” they also faced a troubling dilemma in deciding whether to abstain from the war and uphold their pacifism or join the war effort and fight for the defeat of the German Empire.

Jimmie Higgins is a factory machinist who moonlights as a propagandist for the local office of the Socialist Party in the town of Leesville. His position in the party is one of an eager underling. Jimmie is not the kind who makes fiery speeches at Socialist rallies. He’s the guy who posts the flyers and sets up the chairs. Early in the book, Jimmie has a chance encounter with the Socialist candidate for U.S. President (patterned after Eugene V. Debs). When World War I breaks out in Europe, Jimmie and his Socialist friends are outspokenly against America entering the war, at first. Despite his pacifist intentions, however, Jimmie keeps finding himself getting roped into the war effort. The factory in which he works is converted into a munitions plant. After some German Socialists pay him to distribute anti-war propaganda, Jimmie discovers they are agents of the Kaiser. Sinclair finds humor in such ethical conundrums, but they read true to life nonetheless. As Jimmie’s party comrades squabble over what their official stance should be toward the war, Sinclair satirizes the inner workings of the organization, pointing out, for instance, how the Party’s wealthier members—doctors, lawyers, professors—are treated as elites in a party that preaches universal equality.

Much like Jimmie Higgins, Sinclair is a known propagandist. Though he’s often criticized for laying on his socialist views a little thick, in this novel it’s sometimes difficult to tell exactly what he’s trying to say. In some chapters, he satirizes the socialists; in others, he satirizes the capitalists. Rather than one overarching theme to the book, it reads as if Sinclair is making a different point in each chapter. The plot structure of the novel is almost picaresque in that the hero just kind of stumbles from one escapade to the next, as if Sinclair didn’t have a definite plan in mind when he started the book but rather just made it up as he went along. The prose of this novel is written in a style very similar to Sinclair’s later Lanny Budd series, except that Lanny Budd is an international playboy, whereas Jimmie Higgins is a working-class rube only slightly more intelligent than Forrest Gump. Sinclair makes the reader like Jimmie and sympathize with his well-intentioned Socialism, while simultaneously making fun of him.

Though Sinclair gets across his Socialist views in this novel, reading between the lines reveals a rather apologetic tone to the book. It seems as if Sinclair the Socialist felt the heat during World War I, causing him to temper his views for a mainstream audience and assert that “Socialists love their country too!” Sinclair, through the surrogate of Jimmie, seems to be saying, I can be a Socialist and a patriot at the same time . . . so please don’t beat me up or set my house on fire. The novel also suffers from an absurd ending. Sinclair wants to admonish mainstream America for its persecution of Socialists and pacifists during the Great War, but he feels the need to dilute his message with humor. It’s one example of how Jimmie Higgins just never strikes the right balance between frank and funny. A year after the publication of this novel, Sinclair would be far more successful combining social realism with satirical humor in his novel 100%: The Story of a Patriot.

Mother by Maxim Gorky

Madonna of the Revolution

Following the Russian Revolution and the formation of the Soviet Union, socialist realism became the prevailing, government-approved mode of artistic expression in the USSR. In the literary realm, Maxim Gorky is the epitome of this school of writing. None other than Joseph Stalin called Gorky “the founder of socialist realism.” Gorky didn’t merely write in this style in order to toe the party line; he helped draw the party line. In the early years of the 20th century, Gorky, a colleague of Vladimir Lenin, was active in the formation of the Bolshevik Party and an outspoken voice for Revolution. His novel Mother, published in 1906, is Gorky’s best-known work from this early period in his career. After the defeat of the First Russian Revolution of 1905, Gorky wrote Mother to inspire and motivate socialist revolutionaries in the struggle against the Tsar. Because the Tsarist regime banned the novel, it was first published in English in the pages of Appleton’s Magazine.

Pelageya Nilovna Vlasova, a Russian wife and mother, lives in an unnamed factory town with her husband and son. The husband, an alcoholic who repeatedly beats her, dies unexpectedly, leaving Vlasova to raise her young son Pavel by herself. When Pavel grows into manhood and becomes a factory laborer himself, he gets involved with the underground proletarian movement to incite a socialist revolution against the oppressive monarchical government of Tsar Nicholas II. Soon, Pavel is inviting groups of bohemian types to his home to read from forbidden literature and engage in discussions on political topics. At first the mother is frightened of this movement, but, like a good parent who loves her son, she accepts his guests with politeness. As she gets to know these young people, her fears diminish and she develops a genuine affection for them. As Vlasova listens to the socialist rhetoric of her son and his friends, she gradually becomes a believer in the movement. Eventually, she actively participates in the group’s activities, carrying out missions for this cell of revolutionaries.

Although Gorky may be the posterchild for Soviet socialist realism, his work does have merit above and beyond its propaganda value. In fact, American writers like Jack London and Upton Sinclair published some novels that are just as blatantly propagandistic than this one. London’s The Iron Heel and Sinclair’s The Jungle, however, are also clearly better written than Mother. For starters, Mother is unnecessarily long. Russian authors seem to have a propensity for monumentality in their works, but while authors like Tolstoy, Pasternak, and Sholokhov manage to maintain the reader’s interest over the course of their long works, Gorky’s Mother is too monotonous and repetitive. There are too many scenes of the mother sitting around someone’s kitchen with a few revolutionaries talking about how to distribute political pamphlets. The distribution of socialist literature is really the only revolutionary activity that the reader gets to see this underground network perform, which seems unrealistically kind and gentle for a cadre of insurrectionists. Also hard to believe, the goal of Pavel and his friends seems to be to get themselves arrested and exiled to Siberia. It is a source of pride with them, but hardly seems fruitful to their cause. Beyond a few main players, it is difficult to distinguish the supporting characters, who are mostly nondescript mouthpieces for Gorky’s socialist rhetoric.

Even Gorky admitted that this novel has its faults. That doesn’t detract, however, from the fact that the book does contain a few very powerful scenes of oppression and resistance. The possibility that Mother may be one of the most influential novels of the 20th century is due more to its political content than to its literary merits. Nevertheless, the book would not have had such an impact if Gorky hadn’t the ability to inspire pathos and passion in his readers, as he occasionally does here in Mother.
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The Death Ship by B. Traven

A proletarian seaman’s worst-case scenario

The German author who called himself B. Traven is best known for his book The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. His novel The Death Ship was published in 1926. The narrator is Gerard Gales, a name that Traven often uses for the protagonists of his novels, but this character doesn’t seem to bear much resemblance to the Gerald Gales of Traven’s first novel The Cotton-Pickers. This Gales is from Wisconsin, by way of New Orleans, but spends much of the book assuming other nationalities, ultimately adopting the name Pippip and claiming he’s from Egypt.

Gales, an experienced sailor, has found himself comfortable employment on a fine merchant vessel, The Tuscaloosa. After spending a night ashore in Antwerp, however, the ship departs without him, leaving Gales stranded in Belgium. The Belgian police don’t want him there, so they sneak him into Holland. The Dutch don’t want him either, so he is smuggled off somewhere else. He is bounced around Europe from country to country, the victim of exclusionary immigration laws. Gales applies to various consulates in an attempt to acquire the proper papers, but his requests are denied when he comes up against impossible bureaucratic regulations. This goes on for a third of the book, before the “death ship” even shows up. Without any proper papers, Gales is forced to sign on to a shady and decrepit vessel, the Yorikke, on which he is given the lowliest post on the ship, that of “coal drag.” What could be worse than the job of a stoker, who shovels coal into a scalding boiler for hours on end? The coal drag, who serves as the stokers’ underling.

One very likely reason why Traven never achieved widespread recognition is that his writings have an unapologetically anarchistic and socialistic bent. In The Death Ship, Traven exposes and satirizes two main issues of importance to the working class. One is the bureaucratic growth of governments in the early twentieth century, as manifested in their byzantine and draconian immigration laws. The second is the exploitation of labor on ocean vessels. The crewmen in Traven’s novel are unable to acquire passports or proper sailor’s papers, making them men without a nation. This in turn makes them fodder for white slavery, since men without a nation are essentially men without rights. The captive sailors on the world’s “death ships” are forced to perform the most grueling and dangerous work on board their vessels, which Traven details in his vivid descriptions of the hard labor undertaken by the stokers and coal drags on the Yorikke.

The main fault of the novel is that it’s unnecessarily long, and as a result, far too repetitive. The reader learns way more than anyone would want to know about shoveling coal into a boiler, and how many passport horror stories does one need to hear to get the point? On the other hand, much like the muckraking novels of Upton Sinclair, the fact that someone has documented the horrors faced by laborers of this period does have historical value. Another problem is inconsistency of tone. Does Traven intend this to be a comedy or a horror story? The first half of the book is clearly satirical. Every sentence is a punchline that either exaggerates ridiculous immigration laws or paints the Yorikke as the god-awfulest tub on the seven seas. The latter half of the novel, however, is more melancholy and realistic in its depiction of the exploitation of the sailors.

Traven’s writing calls to mind that of Jack London, who was a probable influence on his work. London is better at telling an adventure story, but Traven, writing a few decades later, is better at the kind of brutal socialist realism that London aspired to. Though The Death Ship isn’t as impressive as The Cotton-Pickers or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Traven’s radical and ballsy writing is always a refreshing change of pace from the mainstream literary canon.
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Man’s Fate by André Malraux

French perspective on Chinese Communist uprising

French author André Malraux’s novel Man’s Fate was published in 1933 and won the prestigious French literary prize the Prix Goncourt. The original French title is La Condition humaine (The Human Condition), but it has been translated into English as Man’s Fate, Man’s Estate, and Storm in Shanghai, the latter title giving some indication of the book’s subject matter.

The novel revolves around a Communist uprising that took place in Shanghai in 1927, known as the Shanghai Massacre or the April 12 Purge. Several men among the book’s international cast of characters are involved in a Communist cell secretly plotting a revolt against the ruling Chinese nationalist party, known as the Kuomintang, led by Chiang Kai-shek. The conspirators hope to gain control of Shanghai before the arrival of a train loaded with Kuomintang forces and headed their way. As the novel opens, Chen, a Communist terrorist, is murdering a government official. He later sets his sights on assassinating Chiang Kai-shek himself. While there are a few scenes of violence and brutality, most of the narrative consists of back room meetings in shops, nightclubs, and opium dens, where the Communists hide, plot, and commiserate. The cast also includes a few French businessmen who represent the commercial interests that France had in China at the time. To further their business ventures, the French support Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, and Malraux is critical of this capitalist colonialism on the part of his native land.

This novel is pro-Communist and to some extent romanticizes terrorism. I don’t have a problem with that. I just don’t like the way the story is told. Malraux seems to have gone to the Joseph Conrad school of approaching everything from an oblique angle, dwelling on insignificant details at the expense of plot, and never giving the reader enough information to understand what’s going on. There is an ostentatious artiness to the prose that comes across as pretentious. It also comes across, for the most part, as more boring than this story should be. I found this period in history and the conflict depicted interesting, but Malraux writes as if he wants to obscure the details from readers who aren’t already in the know. When there are life-and-death events taking place in the story, he chooses to concentrate on the characters’ facial expressions, interior monologues, or quirky eccentricities rather than the vital matters at hand. That’s unfortunate, because there are a few chapters here that are really quite moving (in particular one involving political prisoners). I would have liked this novel better, however, if it had been written by a naturalist writer (like Emile Zola), a proletarian realist (André Stil), or even a neo-Romanticist (Boris Pasternak). In any of those cases, the reader would have gotten more social realism and less navel-gazing modernism.

Man’s Fate will probably appeal mostly to those with an interest in Communist history or leftist literature. If you don’t know much about the 1927 clash between the Communists and the Kuomintang, however, you’re not going to learn a whole lot here. Perhaps because Malraux wants to present his narrative as an insider’s view, he writes the novel as if the reader is already intimately familiar with these events. As far as the broader “human condition” is concerned, Malraux includes many scenes of characters dealing with existential angst. If you’re not in a position of killing or being killed, however, it is difficult to see how their inner turmoil and personal dilemmas are applicable to the non-revolutionary life.

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The Cotton-Pickers by B. Traven

An American drifter in post-Revolutionary Mexico

B. Traven was a German writer who lived for years in Mexico, where most of his fiction is set. The name is a pseudonym. The exact identity of the writer has never been verified, but there are a few educated guesses. Traven’s debut novel, The Cotton-Pickers, was originally published in 1925 in the newspaper of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. It first appeared in book form the following year under the title of The Wobbly, but subsequent editions have used the original title of The Cotton-Pickers.

Gerald Gales is an American drifter wandering through Mexico. He gets a tip that a farmer named Mr. Shine is looking for cotton pickers. Seeking work, Gales sets out to find the farm in the vicinity of an obscure place called Ixtlixochicuauhtepec. At a train station, he meets up with five other drifters looking for the same Mr. Shine. The six wandering laborers decide to team up and travel together to find Shine’s farm, where they then sign on to pick his cotton.

The novel takes place shortly following the Mexican Revolution and the overthrow of the dictator Porfirio Díaz. Since that momentous regime change, the Mexican workers supposedly have more rights, but the employers still exploit them and treat them very much like peons. Here, all the employers seem to be White Europeans or Americans, while the laborers are mostly people of color: Latinos, Indigenous Mexicans, Blacks, Asians (though Gales is White). The Cotton-Pickers is first and foremost a novel about labor. Traven depicts the squalid conditions under which the cotton pickers live and work. Mr. Shine tries to pay them as little as possible, but the workers find ways of fighting for their rights and attaining small victories. This story, however, is not told in the depressing style of a muckraking exposé. Rather, it’s more of a comedy infused with a persistent gallows humor. The cotton pickers work like mules, but they also have fun and enjoy their lives as vagabonds. Traven doesn’t really push any socialist agenda, but he does point out the absurdities and abuses of capitalism and colonialism. Beyond Shine’s farm, the narrative also follows Gales as he moves on to other jobs, sometimes accompanied by a cotton-picking friend or two.

I had heard the name B. Traven before, but this is my first time reading his work. He is best known as the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the basis for the John Huston/Humphrey Bogart film. I really enjoyed this book. Rarely does it occur that I “discover” an author and immediately think I want to read everything this person wrote, but such is the case with Traven. (I also love Mexico, so that probably has something to do with it.) Traven’s closest equivalent might be John Steinbeck, as seen in labor novels like The Grapes of Wrath and In Dubious Battle. Traven, however, comes across with fewer pretensions of literary dignity and more of a down-to-earth matter-of-fact bluntness. His prose often has the feel of pulp fiction, with occasional touches of Ernest Hemingway or Jack London. For a book from the 1920s, The Cotton-Pickers is remarkably forthright and uninhibited. In one memorable passage, Traven describes a whorehouse in Tampico and captures its raunchy reality without ever saying anything obscene.

The term “Wobbly” was a nickname for a member of the Industrial Workers of the World labor union. Neither Gales nor anyone else in the book is a member of the IWW, but Gale reminds someone of a Wobbly in that wherever he goes, labor trouble follows. That’s not explained until the final page of the book. The Cotton-Pickers is a much better title. Gales is a recurring character in several of Traven’s books. I look forward to following his Mexican wanderings in subsequent novels.
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Engineer Menni by Alexander Bogdanov

Prequel to Red Star’s Martian utopia

Physician, philosopher, and Russian revolutionary Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov was one of the founders of the Bolshevik party before being expelled by his rival Vladimir Lenin. Bogdanov also authored two science fiction novels. Engineer Menni, published in 1913, is the prequel to his 1908 utopian novel Red Star. In Red Star, an earthling is invited to visit a perfect Communist utopia on Mars. Engineer Menni takes place a few generations earlier and shows how that Communist paradise came into being. Both novels have a character named Menni. Engineer Menni was briefly mentioned in Red Star as the illustrious ancestor of the Menni character in that book. In this second novel, Bogdanov delves deeper into the earlier Menni’s life.

The story begins in the year 1667 of our calendar. By that time Mars had already developed a technologically advanced civilization. Although Mars has a few large bodies of water, the famed canals that were viewed by Earth telescopes of the 19th century did not yet exist. To create more habitable land for Mars’s growing population, a genius engineer named Menni comes up with an ambitious plan to dig a system of canals to direct water into desert areas of the planet. Not only will this irrigate vast stretches of land for agriculture; it will fundamentally alter the climate of large areas of land, making them more livable. (This “terraforming” of Mars calls to mind the planned climate alteration of Frank Herbert’s Dune.) In assuming the leadership of his Great Project, as it comes to be called, Menni is granted a great deal of political and financial power, effectively making him one of the most powerful men on Mars. His uncompromising attitude leads to conflicts with various stakeholders, including government officials who resent his high level of authority and workers who dislike his negative attitude toward trade unions.

Just as with Red Star, it’s really quite amazing how well-written this is. For a science fiction novel that was published over a century ago, it shows none of the clunkiness or kitschiness suffered by so many of its contemporaries. Surely some of the credit for that is due to the translator, Charles Rougle, who prepared the English text of both Red Star and Engineer Menni for the combined edition published by Indiana University Press. Although the story deals with topics pertinent to the burgeoning Russian Revolution, the prose reads as if it were written last week. Bogdanov forgoes any far-fetched futuristic flights of fancy to present a narrative grounded in science (including political science). Even though we know now that there are no literal canals on Mars, Bogdanov manages to construct a very rational and realistic narrative around the idea.

Despite all its admirable qualities, Engineer Menni is not quite as interesting or compelling as Red Star. Menni is not a socialist but a capitalist, so whereas Red Star was an optimistic book about what’s right with communism, this is a pessimistic book about what’s wrong with capitalism. The critique that Bogdanov presents is not fiery enough to be exciting. The book often takes the form of policy debates between Menni and his young socialist protégé Netti. There is a commendable verisimilitude to the proceedings of politics on Mars—one can almost recognize some of today’s Congressional hearings—but Bogdanov ultimately veers away from realism into dream sequences and a touch of mysticism. Together, Red Star and Engineer Menni make for an impressive literary achievement, but the latter book is clearly the weaker of the two. Fans of vintage science fiction will enjoy these books, whether a Bolshevik or not, but they will appeal especially to those with an interest in the history of the Russian Revolution and the birth of the Soviet state.

In the First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

An eye-opening look inside Stalin’s think-tank prisons

Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, might be best known for his nonfiction opus The Gulag Archipelago, a history of the system of forced labor camps scattered across the Soviet Union during the reign of Joseph Stalin. Less well-known is his earlier novel In the First Circle, published in 1968, a fictional narrative set within a Soviet prison. The prison in this case is a specific kind of gulag called a sharashka, a research and development facility staffed by prisoners with science and engineering backgrounds. Solzhenitsyn had first-hand experience serving time in both a hard-labor gulag and a sharashka. His personal insight lends credence and authenticity to this brutally frank exposé of the Soviet prison system.

Marfino is a sharashka located just outside of Moscow. The inmates there are primarily working on projects of an auditory nature. Stalin has ordered a coding device to scramble top secret telephone conversations that can only be unscrambled by the listener. (This takes place in 1949, so they are trying to accomplish this with pre-digital technology.) Another zek (prisoner) is working on using sonographs of human speech to identify the speaker in a treasonous phone call intercepted by the MGB (a precursor to the KGB). The zeks work side by side with “free workers,” non-prisoners who act as guards while also collaborating on research projects. Though deprived of their freedom, separated from their loved ones, and denied anything approaching the luxuries of life, the prisoners in this sharashka know they are better off than those sentenced to a Siberian gulag. In Solzhenitsyn’s depiction of Marfino, there is no violence, but all the prisoners know that if they don’t cooperate they may at any time be shipped off to a gulag where they may be frozen, starved, or shot.

Despite such depressing subject matter, Solzhenitsyn injects a gallows humor throughout. The absurd excesses of injustice under Stalin’s regime is frequently discussed in a sarcastic tone, likely the only defense mechanism available to those inevitably forced to resign themselves to having their lives taken away. Solzhenitsyn often shows the zeks’ trying to circumvent rules and get away with whatever they can. Such transgressions are not depicted with the goofiness of Hogan’s Heroes’ capers, but rather with a mixture of humor and poignancy reminiscent of M*A*S*H. The narrative of the novel is not confined to the prison, but also covers the lives of prisoner’s wives, free workers, and prison officials outside the walls of Marfino.

The main problem with In the First Circle is its inordinate length, 96 chapters in all. The fact that a book is long doesn’t make it bad, but lengthiness is unjustified when the narrative becomes repetitive and tedious. After a while it feels like you’re reading the same cell-block debates on the pros and cons of Communism over and over again. (Some zeks still believe wholeheartedly in Communism, despite their treatment by the government.) At first it seems as if the novel will focus on a few prisoners, but the cast quickly expands to the point at which it’s difficult to tell all the minor characters apart. Even after the 80th chapter, Solzhenitsyn keeps introducing new characters, whose stories aren’t that much different from those he’s already profiled. When one zek has an affair with a female free worker, it feels realistic; when two or three risk such romances, it feels like overkill.

Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn populates this novel with compelling characters and provides a truly eye-opening look at life under Stalin. Westerners will come away from this novel with a much more informed and vivid understanding of Soviet society. After dozens of chapters, the book starts to feel like hard work, but for those interested in this subject, the work is worth it.
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Red Star by Alexander Bogdanov

Ingenious Bolshevik utopia on Mars

Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov was one of the founding members of the Bolshevik party in Russia and a friend of Vladimir Lenin until they had a falling out. Bogdanov was also a physician, philosopher, and a writer of science fiction. His first and best-known work in that genre is his novel Red Star. The book was published in 1908, after the failed Russian Revolution of 1905. Bogdanov nevertheless kept Bolshevik hopes alive with this novel about a utopian Communist society on Mars. An English translation of Red Star by Charles Rougle was published in 1984 by the University of Indiana Press, in a volume edited by Loren Graham and Richard Stites.

Leonid, the narrator of Red Star, is a mathematician living in St. Petersburg and, like Bogdanov, a Bolshevik revolutionary. Through his political party activities he meets an unusual man named Menni, who claims to be a visitor from the South. After they strike up a friendship, however, Menni reveals to Leonid that he is a Martian. His people have already conquered the problem of space travel, and he invites Leonid to join him on a journey to his home planet. In fact, Menni confesses that he has intentionally recruited Leonid as a possible cultural exchange ambassador through whom the two cultures can learn about one another before the Martians reveal their existence to the people of Earth. Leonid, or Lenni as the Martians call him, agrees to the trip and accompanies Menni to Mars, where he finds an ideal communist society in operation, the likes of which he and his Bolshevik comrades have envisioned in their dreams.

I read a lot of utopian and dystopian science fiction from the early years of the genre. I enjoy experiencing the futuristic visions of antiquated writers and seeing how those visions measure up to subsequent history. Old sci-fi literature, however, is often unrealistic in its speculations and clunky in style. Sometimes this can add to a book’s charm, but sometimes it merely annoys. Bogdanov’s Red Star, however, reads as remarkably intelligent, eloquent, and relevant more than a century after it was written. Some credit for that is likely due to Rougle, who’s translation renders Bogdanov’s prose as lively and articulate as if it were written last week.

Bogdanov himself, however, deserves commendation for how well thought-out his utopia is. Nothing in Bogdanov’s vision of the future is there without a reason. When he describes the fictional technological advances of Martian society, his speculations are supported by reasonable scientific justifications. There’s no superfluous fantasy just for the sake of “Wouldn’t it be cool if . . .” The same holds true for the book’s political content. Every element of the story is specifically designed to express Bogdanov’s ideas on Bolshevism. When the characters talk about events in Martian history or policies of the Martian government, there is always a well-conceived reason for those decisions, within Bogdanov’s conception of Marxism.

Unlike a lot of utopian novels, Bogdanov does actually include a satisfying fictional narrative amongst all the political, scientific, and economic theory. The book doesn’t read like a stuffy treatise. An unconventional romance livens things up and doesn’t feel gratuitous. If there is an aspect of the book that feels a little overdone, it’s the focus on the narrator’s mental health. Lenni’s propensity for mood swings and hallucinations is at times a bit too histrionic. That is a small complaint, however, in what is otherwise a fascinating and entertaining read. Having not only influenced many subsequent authors in the genre but also the very development of the Soviet Union itself, Red Star is truly a landmark work of Russian science fiction that will be of interest to more than just Bolsheviks.

The Recording Angel by Edwin Arnold Brenholtz

Ridiculous labor novel

So-called radical novels of labor realism were plentiful in early 20th-century American literature, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle being the most famous example. Published a year earlier than The Jungle, in 1905, The Recording Angel was written by an actual proletariat, Edwin Arnold Brenholtz, who worked as a civil engineer for railroad and mining companies. The story involves a strike at an iron and steel mill in the fictional city of Steelton, Missouri. The title of the novel refers to when one character makes a vow to “the recording angel of God,” which apparently is a thing in Judeo-Christian mythology, but I had never heard the expression before. I enjoy reading the muckraking novels of this period because they provide an interesting look into a time in history when an American socialist movement challenged the trust-holding oligarchs of their day and fought for much-needed reforms (with mixed success). In The Recording Angel, however, the discussion of labor issues is so divorced from reality it’s absolutely bizarre.

For starters, the main reason for the workers’ strike in this book is not low wages or long hours but rather the fact that the management insists upon addressing the laborers by numbers rather than by names. Was that ever really a common problem? And would anyone have cared as long as they had food on the table? Nepotism is another complaint, since the children of the wealthy are granted management positions over more qualified workers. One rich, benevolent stockholder takes the side of the workers and supports them with his financial resources. His son, however, an executive at the mill, is an iron-fisted and abusive employer. Was this really labor’s problem in the early 20th century, that the boss’s son was a jerk? The reasons behind the strike, however, are barely relevant, since the strike hardly plays a role in the plot. Instead, Brenholtz opts for exaggerated melodrama and gives us an attempted murder, a contested will, a blackmailing scheme, and poisonings. The novel also includes a Jules Verne-type science fiction element in the employment of a technological device that would have been brand new and rather rare at the time of the novel’s publication but has now been commonplace for at least a century.

I don’t believe there is a single working-class character in the entire book, just a confusing assortment of lawyers, detectives, politicians, and oligarchs, many of them painted as broadly as a Batman villain. So much of the novel is taken up by interminable conversations between the blackmailer and the capitalist whom he is blackmailing. Chapter after chapter, the blackmailer reiterates the hold he has over his victim. Enough already, we get it. Could you please stop beating this dead horse so we can move on with some semblance of a story? After all that nonsense, the main thrust of the plot climaxes early, which leaves the reader having to plod through half a dozen epilogues.

The word “socialism” is used in this book as a miraculous cure for all societal ills, but The Recording Angel doesn’t actually teach the reader anything about socialism like the works of Upton Sinclair or Jack London do. From reading this novel, one would think that the socialist movement depends on wealthy industrialists who magnanimously decide to bequeath their riches to “the workers’ cause.” The cast of this novel includes at least three such unrealistic benefactors. If that’s what the success of the radical left in America rests upon, then they’ve got a long wait ahead of them before that pipe dream comes to fruition. The Recording Angel is not just a failure within the specific realm of the radical labor novel. It’s an example of bad writing in any genre.

By Bread Alone by I. K. Friedman

Prototype of the American muckraker novel

Isaac Khan Friedman was a socialist and settlement house worker in Chicago before becoming a journalist and novelist. He published a handful of novels about the working class and labor issues. Literature professor Walter B. Rideout, in his book The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900–1954, called Friedman’s By Bread Alone, published in 1901, the first radical novel of the 20th century. As such, By Bread Alone is a sort of prototype of the muckraking literary movement that would soon follow, marked most notably by Upton Sinclair’s landmark labor novel The Jungle of 1906.

By Bread Alone is based on the real-life events of the Homestead Strike which occurred in Homestead, Pennsylvania, outside of Pittsburgh, in 1892. Friedman sets his narrative, however, in the Chicago area, specifically in the nearby fictional town of Marvin, Illinois, which, much like Gary, Indiana, is named after the family that owns the local steel mills. Steel tycoon Henry Marvin has thousands in his employ, but he cares more about his own profits than the lives of his workers. When he refuses to pay his laborers fairly or improve their working and living conditions, they form a union and strike.

Friedman’s writing bears much resemblance to Upton Sinclair’s, but a bit more archaic in tone and clumsy in its delivery. Friedman frequently employs bizarre, outdated vocabulary, and his sentences are often structured in pointlessly convoluted syntax. Friedman is also guilty of one narrative mistake that Sinclair committed often in his career. The protagonist of the story is not a proletariat but rather an educated, wealthy “gentleman” who decides to slum it in the mills as a sort of sociological experiment. The events of class war and labor strife are not revealed through the lives of the workers but rather through the eyes of this labor tourist. Many of Sinclair’s labor novels, such as King Coal or Boston, are related through this same sort of upper-class intermediary. The only novel in which Sinclair tells his story directly through the workers themselves is The Jungle, which is why that book is his masterpiece. The greatest labor novels in American literature—The Jungle, The Octopus, The Grapes of Wrath—are the ones that dispense with the gentleman protagonist. In writing By Bread Alone, Friedman had yet to learn that lesson, and as a result the reader has to sit through an awful lot of clichéd Victorian romance to get to the scenes of class struggle. Much of the novel revolves around hero Blair Carrhart’s romance with a wealthy young “lady,” the mill-owner Marvin’s daughter. Much like Sinclair’s The Coal War, Friedman can’t even seriously entertain the idea of his gentleman hero hooking up with a working woman beneath his class. So much for sympathizing with the workers.

As a work of social realism, By Bread Alone may have been pioneering for its social aspects, but it fails in the realism department. The most effective scenes in the book are those of the strike and subsequent class violence, but such episodes never really seem to ring true. There’s too much heroism and not enough blood. Friedman’s work can’t compare with the gripping and visceral scenes of labor warfare in Emile Zola’s epic strike novel Germinal. When characters die in By Bread Alone, you recognize them as symbols but you don’t feel for them as human beings. His plot feels too facile; particularly the last couple chapters, which read like they’re from a different book entirely, and many problems are resolved in deus ex machina fashion. Historically, By Bread Alone may hold pride of precedence, but there are many other novels of muckraking naturalism more worthy of a reader’s time.
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