Janet Zandy

Nicholas Coles

American Working-Class Literature is an edited collection containing over 300 oieces of literature by, about, and in the interests of the working class in America. Organized in a broadly historical fashion, with texts are grouped around key historical and cultural developments in working-class life, this volume records the literature of the working classes from the early laborers of the 1600 up until the present.

An Anthology

American Working-class Literature

Peter Oresick

In this companion volume to their anthology Working Classics, Nicholas Coles and Peter Oresick present poems written in the 1980s and 1990s that address the nature and culture of nonindustrial work---white collar, domestic, clerical, technical, managerial, or professional. They cross lines of status, class, and gender and range from mopping floors to television news reporting, Wall Street brokerage, and raising children.

The Poetry of Work

For a Living

Paul Lauter

A History of American Working-Class Literature sheds light not only on the lived experience of class but the enormously varied creativity of working-class people throughout the history of what is now the United States. By charting a chronology of working-class experience, as the conditions of work have changed over time, this volume shows how the practice of organizing, economic competition, place, and time shape opportunity and desire. The subjects range from transportation narratives and slave songs to the literature of deindustrialization and globalization. Among the literary forms discussed are memoir, journalism, film, drama, poetry, speeches, fiction, and song. Essays focus on plantation, prison, factory, and farm, as well as on labor unions, workers' theaters, and innovative publishing ventures. Chapters spotlight the intersections of class with race, gender, and place. The variety, depth, and many provocations of this History are certain to enrich the study and teaching of American literature.

A History of American Working-Class Literature

From the cannery rows of California to the sweatshops of New York, this anthology of poems captures the drama of work and working-class life in industrial America. It speaks of rolling mills, mine shafts, and foundries, and of a people who dig coal, tap blast furnaces, sew shirts, clean fish, and assemble cars. These subjects, though largely absent from literary anthologies and textbooks, are increasingly evident in the work of contemporary poets. Working Classics gathers the best and most representative of these poems, American and Canadian, from 1945 to the present. Included are poems by Antler, Robert Bly, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Jim Daniels, Patricia Dobler, Stephen Dunn, Tess Gallagher, Edward Hirsch, David Ignatow, June Jordan, Lawrence Joseph, Philip Levine, Chris Llewellyn, Joyce Carol Oates, Anthony Petrosky, Michael Ryan, Gary Soto, Tom Wayman, James Wright, and many others. The result is a diverse and evocative collection of 169 poems by 74 poets, nearly a third of them women.

Nicholas Coles

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