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Hawk's Nest
Paperback
Series: Appalachian Echoes
General FictionHistorical Fiction
Publisher Price: $29.95
ISBN13: 9781572332805
Publisher: University of Tennessee Press
Published: Jun 7 2004
Pages: 320
Weight: 1.11
Height: 0.80 Width: 6.38 Depth: 9.14
Language: English
Appalachian Echoes
Thomas E. Douglass, series fiction editor
The building of a tunnel at Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, beginning in 1930 has been called the worst industrial disaster in American history: more died there than in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the Sunshine and Farmington mine disasters combined. And when native West Virginian Hubert Skidmore tried to tell the real story in his 1941 novel, Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation apparently convinced publisher Doubleday, Doran & Co. to pull the book from publication after only a few hundred copies had appeared.
Now the Appalachian Echoes series makes Hawk's Nest available to a new generation of readers. This is the riveting tale of starving men and women making their way from all over the Depression-era United States to the hope and promise of jobs and a new life. What they find in West Virginia is tunnelitis, or silicosis, a disease which killed at least seven hundred workers--probably many more--a large number of them African American, virtually all of them poor. Skidmore's roman à clef provides a narrative with emotional drive, interwoven with individual stories that capture the hopes and the desperation of the Depression: the Reips who come from the farm with their pots and pans and hard-working children, the immigrants Pete and Anna, kind waitress Lessie Lee, and hobos Jim Martin, Long Legg, and Owl Jones, the last of whom, as an African American, receives the worst treatment. This important story of conscience encompasses labor history, Appalachian studies, and literary finesse.
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