My blog entry for April 6, 2014 (scroll down a few months) discusses three top-notch works of fiction dramatizing the plight of the American working class in the early 1900’s. I have just finished a fourth, which deserves equal credit for a powerful portrayal of the exploitation of industrial workers from a Marxist perspective. There is no doubt in my mind that A World to Win, by Jack Conroy (published 1935), is one of the best books I’ve read in a decade, and one of the great novels of his era. I can’t judge Conroy’s body of work because I had never heard of him before I came across A World to Win in the library. The book had been out of print for several decades, but recently republished by the Univ. of Illinois Press’ series called The Radical Novel Reconsidered.

Conroy’s novel is the story of two brothers who grow apart as post-World War I America goes through expansion of industrialization, Prohibition, the Great Depression, and the rise of world fascism. Each brother, in his own way, discovers firsthand the unremitting hardships endured by blue collar workers and the hopelessness which clouds the future of an entire class. Conroy’s characters and their dialogue are as real and colorful as if we were walking those picket lines ourselves. There is little to distinguish A World to Win from the best of Steinbeck. Steinbeck’s prose may have a sharper, more naturalistic edge to it, but Conroy has an earthy Zolaesque frankness in which no subject is taboo, and the sordid details of these humble lives sit side by side with the mundane.

One of the most brilliant devices of this novel is role reversal, and Conroy skillfully utilizes that device not once, but twice, between the two Hurley brothers. The dynamic sibling relationship between these two strong characters is an unforgettable metaphor for the sort of crisscrossing journeys that workers and intellectuals made during some terrible and tormented periods of our history. These journeys, this history, deserve to be made more familiar to the generations of today, and A World to Win deserves to be read and appreciated as a key exponent of this critical process of familiarization.