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I. Thomas Telford, StonemasonII. George Stephenson, Engine-ManIII. John Gibson, SculptorIV. William Herschel, BandsmanV. Jean Francois Millet, PainterVI. James Garfield, Canal BoyVII. Thomas Edward, Shoemaker
Working Men features fourteen stories in as many different voices: of men and women, young and old, blue collar and middle class, salesmen and craftsmen, vets and draft dodgers. They are the voices of Native Americans, New England Yankees, southern gentlewomen, by turns serious and comic, gay and straight, playful and sad. Masterfully spun and compellingly crafted, these stories comprise a diverse gallery of characters, written with an almost magical ability to bring each one achingly, vividly, truthfully to life.
Biographies of Working Men by Grant Allen High up among the heather-clad hills which form the broad dividing barrier between England and Scotland, the little river Esk brawls and bickers over its stony bed through a wild land of barren braesides and brown peat mosses, forming altogether some of the gloomiest and most forbidding scenery in the whole expanse of northern Britain. Almost the entire bulk of the counties of Dumfries, Kirkcudbright, and Ayr is composed of just such solemn desolate upland wolds, with only a few stray farms or solitary cottages sprinkled at wide distances over their bare bleak surface, and with scarcely any sign of life in any part save the little villages which clus...
This novel of Mississippi hill country life depicts some of the more troubling and unpublicized aspects of the New Deal by tracing the fortunes of the Taylor family, sharecroppers who move to town to work for the "WP and A," the Works Progress Administration. John Faulkner, a one-time WPA project engineer, has much to satirize in this broadly comic novel. First and foremost are the Taylors: exasperating and unemployable, they are unaccountably abiding; hopelessly destitute, they place a higher premium on a new radio than on food and shelter. Faulkner also casts a sardonic eye on the town merchants, who extend credit to WPA workers as quickly as they inflate prices, and, of course, on the WPA itself, an agency that entices naive, desperate country folk with the promise of a dole--only to lay them off and then ignore them. In his foreword, Trent Watts establishes the singularity of Men Working while noting in it echoes of Tobacco Road, As I Lay Dying, and The Grapes of Wrath. Watts also identifies in John Faulkner's tone an ambivalence shared by many southerners who witnessed the changes wrought by "progress" upon their traditional way of life.