The Working-Class Novel

The industrial revolution and its aftershocks gave the novel a new subject: work itself, and what it does to the people who have no choice but to do it. Six books track that subject from a Manchester mill to a Dust Bowl highway.

1. 1
   Mary Barton

   Elizabeth Gaskell · 1848

   Lvl 4400pp

   Gaskell walks straight into a Manchester mill worker's home during a strike: the industrial novel's founding act of sympathy, aimed at a comfortable readership that needed convincing.

   ＋Save
2. 2
   The Jungle

   Upton Sinclair · 1906

   Lvl 4413pp

   Sinclair's Lithuanian immigrant is chewed up by the Chicago meatpacking plants that are chewing up the meat: muckraking journalism disguised as, and then overtaken by, a novel.

   ＋Save
3. 3
   Sons and Lovers

   D. H. Lawrence · 1913

   Lvl 5420pp

   Lawrence turns his own mining-town childhood into fiction: the labor novel's interior turn, class written as psychology and desire, not just conditions.

   ＋Save
4. 4
   Germinal

   Émile Zola · 1885

   Lvl 5512pp

   Zola sends a starving miner into a doomed strike and lets the mine itself become a character: naturalism's labor epic, and the bleakest book on this list.

   ＋Save
5. 5
   The Octopus: A Story of California

   Frank Norris · 1901

   Lvl 5480pp

   Norris pits California wheat farmers against a railroad monopoly: capital and labor at continental scale, the fight Steinbeck picks back up a generation later.

   ＋Save
6. 6
   The Grapes of Wrath

   John Steinbeck · 1939

   Lvl 5464pp

   Steinbeck's capstone sends the Joads down Route 66 into a country with no use for them: the genre's most canonical, most devastating account of labor with nowhere left to sell itself.

   ＋Save