Juniata Faculty Select Favorite 'On the Job' Novels
As the country moves into Labor Day, the holiday's connection to celebrating workers is sometimes lost. Four Juniata English faculty agreed to recommend their favorite novels centered on the working world. Reading these classics will not be a labor, we promise.
Mark Hochberg, Dana Professor of English
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939)--The novel explores in graphic detail the plight of farmers and fruit pickers during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.
Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith (1925)--By following the career of a dedicated physician, it explores the struggle of an idealist against the realities of contemporary medical research and practice.
Judy Katz, associate professor of English
William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890)--In New York City in the 1890s, a group of artists, writers, entrepreneurs, socialists, capitalists, and southern and northern aristocrats contribute to the publication of a new magazine and come into conflict over differences in their political, socio-economic, cultural, and aesthetic values. Howells writes a couple of very funny chapters about the main character's attempt to find an apartment in NYC, as frustrating and amusing in the 1890s as it is today.
George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871-3)--In its complex analysis of middle-class and upper-middle-class life in mid-19th-century England, the novel pays a lot of attention to the meaning of work and the ways people succeed or fail at what they do.
Peter Goldstein, Benedict Professor of English
John Le Carre, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963)--More than a thriller, this novel explores the relationship between our jobs and our lives, and what decisions we make when we accept the ethical standards that our work demands.Kevin Clark, instructor in English
Thomas Bell, Out of this Furnace (1941)--This novel attempts to document the migratory experience of eastern Europeans in Pittsburgh's Monongahela Valley in the 1890's.