Catalog Search Results
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Tells the story of Paul Morel, a young artist growing into manhood in a British working-class community near the Nottingham coalfields. His mother Gertrude, unhappily married to Paul's hard-drinking father, devotes all her energies to her son. They develop a powerful and passionate relationship, but eventually tensions arise when Paul falls in love with a girl and seeks to escape his family ties. Torn between his desire for independence and his abiding...
2) Martin Eden
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Martin Eden (1909) is a novel by American writer Jack London. The book follows the tradition of the Künstlerroman, a narrative that traces the life and development of an artist, to tell the story of a young man not unlike London himself. Part fiction, part autobiography, Martin Eden examines the consequences of dreams and achievements, successes and failures, for a young artist struggling with fame. The novel is heavily influenced by London's socialist...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
Vividly articulates the despair and disillusionment of blue-collar America' Sunday Times 'Hillbilly Elegy' is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis-that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance...
4) Empire Falls
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.4 - AR Pts: 34
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
Miles Roby, called back from college to the small town of Empire Falls in Dexter County, Maine to take care of his ailing mother, falls into a rut that keeps him trapped until years later when a series of revelations and tragedies jolts him back into an awareness of his life.
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.4 - AR Pts: 20
Language
English
Description
In a critically acclaimed memoir, a correspondent for The New York Times recounts growing up in the Alabama hill country, the son of a violent veteran and a mother who tried to insulate her children from the poverty and ignorance of life.
This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills...
Author
Publisher
Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
Pub. Date
2016.
Language
English
Description
Shares the story of the author's family and upbringing, describing how they moved from poverty to an upwardly mobile clan that included the author, a Yale Law School graduate, while navigating the demands of middle class life and the collective demons ofthe past.
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
A journalist describes the years she worked in low-paying domestic work under wealthy employers, contrasting the privileges of the upper-middle class to the realities of the overworked laborers supporting them.
Land's plans of breaking free from the roots of her hometown in the Pacific Northwest to chase her dreams were cut short when a summer fling turned into an unexpected pregnancy. She turned to housekeeping to make ends meet, took classes online...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Nine classic short stories portraying the isolation, criminality, morality, and rebellion of the working class from award-winning, bestselling author Alan Sillitoe The titular story follows the internal decisions and external oppressions of a seventeen-year-old inmate in a juvenile detention center who is known only by his surname, Smith. The wardens have given the boy a light workload because he shows talent as a runner. But if he wins the national...
10) The jungle
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 8 - AR Pts: 22
Language
English
Description
"A manifesto for social change, The Jungle savagely reveals the American dream gone sour. Sinclair strips away the myth of America as a boon to the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Instead, the golden land of manifest destiny is shown to be a Dickensian nightmare, where wage slaves can barely survive, where powerless immigrants are chewed up by a capitalist machine oiled by corruption and bald greed. But the story is more...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Orphans Gig and Rye Dolan don't have a penny to their names. The brothers work grueling, odd jobs each day just to secure a meal, and spend nights sleeping wherever they can with other day laborers. Twenty-three-year-old Gig is a passionate union man, fighting for fair pay and calling out the corrupt employers who exploit the working class. Eager to emulate his older brother, Rye follows suit, though he can't quite muster Gig's passion for the cause....
13) Overboard
Pub. Date
[2018]
Language
English
Formats
Description
A spoiled, wealthy yacht owner is thrown overboard and becomes the target of revenge from his mistreated employee. A remake of the 1987 comedy.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
A National Book Award Finalist and New York Times bestseller!
Studs Terkel's classic oral history Working is a compelling look at jobs and the people who do them. Consisting of over one hundred interviews with everyone from a gravedigger to a studio head, this book provides an enduring portrait of people's feelings about their working lives. This edition includes a new foreword by New York Times journalist Adam Cohen.
15) Lawn boy
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
For Mike Munoz, a young Chicano living in Washington State, life has been a whole lot of waiting for something to happen. Not too many years out of high school and still doing menial work--and just fired from his latest gig as a lawn boy on a landscaping crew--he knows that he's got to be the one to shake things up if he's ever going to change his life. But how? In this funny, angry, touching, and ultimately deeply inspiring novel, bestselling author...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
What You Have Left is an unforgettable story of love, loss, and, most of all, longing.
In 1976, on the day of his wife's funeral, Wylie Greer drops off his five-year-old daughter, Holly, at his father-in-law's dairy farm on the outskirts of Columbia, South Carolina. Wylie tells her he just needs a little time to clear his head, but thirty years pass before Holly sees her father again -- "time I spent wondering what I'd done to make him leave," she...
18) Mary Barton
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
When John Barton's wife dies, he is forced to raise his daughter, Mary, alone, while he grieves the love of his life. Though he is a hard-working man, John struggles to provide for his family. Realizing how unfair his financial situation is, John becomes very resentful towards the unethical distribution of wealth between the social classes. Against John's wishes, when Mary comes of age, she decides to help support their family by working in a dressmaking...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
The Valley of the Moon (1913) is a novel by American writer Jack London. Inspired by his experiences as a working-class man and dedicated socialist, London incorporates aspects of his own biography-his interest in sailing, his life on a ranch in Sonoma County-to tell a story of hardship, hope, and perseverance. Having grown disillusioned with the labor movement, London uses the novel to advocate for sustainable agriculture and other alternatives to...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend has set the standard for viewing American history through the prism of working people. From indentured servants and slaves in seventeenth-century Chesapeake to high-tech workers in contemporary Silicon Valley.
Now, the authors have added a wealth of fresh analysis of labor's role in American life, with new material on sex workers, disability issues, labor's relation to the global justice movement and the...