America's workers have been singing, reciting, performing, telling stories, writing, and publishing for more than three centuries. Ranging from early colonial times to the present, American Working-Class Literature presents more than 300 literary texts that exemplify this tradition. It demonstrates how American working people live, labor, struggle, express themselves, and give meaning to their experiences both inside and outside of the workplace. The only book of its kind, this groundbreaking anthology includes work not only by the industrial proletariat but also by slaves and unskilled workers, by those who work unpaid at home, and by workers in contemporary service industries. As diverse in race, gender, culture, and region as America's working class itself, the selections represent a wide range of genres including fiction, poetry, drama, memoir, oratory, journalism, letters, oral history, and songs. Works by little-known or anonymous authors are included alongside texts from such acclaimed writers as Frederick Douglass, Upton Sinclair, Tillie Olsen, Philip Levine, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Leslie Marmon Silko. A rich selection of contemporary writing includes Martin Espada's poem "Alabanza" about the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center.
American Working-Class Literature is organized chronologically into seven sections that highlight key historical and cultural developments in working-class life. The book is enhanced by an editors' introduction, section introductions, and individual head notes for each selection that provide biographical and historical context. A timeline of working-class history, rich illustrations, sidebars, reading lists, and a bibliography ofcritical commentary are also included. This unique volume is ideal for courses in American literature, cultural and working-class studies, and labor history.

This is a book about working-class identity, consciousness, and self-determination. It offers an alternative to middle-class assimiliation and working-class amnesia. The twenty-five contributors use memory--both personal and collective--to show the relationship between the uncertain economic rhythms of working-class life and the possibilities for cultural and political agency. Manual labor and intellectual work are connected in these multicultural autobiographies of writers, educators, artists, political activists, musicians, and photographers and in the cultural work--the poems, stories, photographs, lectures, music--they produce. Illustrated with family snapshots, this collection--the first of its kind--includes the work of a female machinist who is also a poet, a secretary who is also a writer, a poet who worked on the assembly line, a musician who was also a red-diaper baby, and an academic who is recovering the working-class writing of her father. The consciousness that is revealed in this book makes evident the value of class identity to collective, democratic struggle. The contributors are Maggie Anderson, Steve Cagan, Jim Daniels, Lennard Davis, Masani Alexis de Veaux, Sue Doro, Julie Olsen Edwards, Carol Faulkner, Barbara Fox, Laura Hapke, Florence Howe, David Joseph, Linda McCarriston, Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, Gregory Mantsios, M. Bella Mirabella, Joseph Nassar, Tillie Olsen, Maxine Scates, Saul Slapikoff, Clarissa T. Sligh, Carol Tarlen, Joann Maria Vasoncellos, Pat Wynne, and Janet Zandy.

"Meridel Le Sueur, Barbara Smith, Nellie Wong, Judy Grahn, and Sharon Doubiago are among the writers who range through speeches, songs, poetry, essays, and fiction in this moving anthology." --Ms. Magazine "Powerful in their dailiness, and full of memory, frustration, endurance, and occasionally a softer emotion, these affecting selections deserve a wide audience." --Feminist Bookstore News "The range of voices raised and experiences represented throughout the book is expansive and liberating, as is the inclusion of any number of unforgettable works by lesser-known writers." --VLS "Ambitious, eclectic, historically wide-ranging. . . . The multicultural (primarily American) contents range from pieces by Agnes Smedley and Mother Jones to contemporary activist storytellers such as Marge Piercy. . . . The authors . . . write proudly and gratefully about the benefits of working-class life . . . a brave anthology, a very welcome addition to the workbench, the kitchen table, and the bookcase." --Women's Review of Books "Rich . . . archival and popular." --Belles Lettres "Their voices . . . form a chorus that speaks for the majority of women in the United States. They are writers whose theme is the working-class woman, and the ethnic, racial and geographic diversity of the working-class experience." --San Francisco Examiner "Zandy's anthology . . . helps us better understand who 'we' are and how many of us have been missing from the stories our culture teaches and learns." --The Literary Review "A powerful and uncompromising collection of essays, stories, poems, and oral histories, and more, reflecting the history and personal experiences of working-class women in America." --Booklist "What diversity . . . The works reveal a complexity of working-class experience intricately linked like pieces in a giant jigsaw puzzle." --New Directions for Women Janet Zandy is a professor of language and literature at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She has published widely on women's issues.