The three Moss brothers — Big Mat, Chinatown, and Melody — leave Kentucky sharecropping in 1919 for the steel mills of western Pennsylvania, part of the Great Migration north. The novel follows what the mills take from each of them: work, injury, and disillusionment, set against union organizing and the racial lines drawn inside the industrial North. Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison praised the book; it is now counted a classic of Great Migration fiction.
Author: William Attaway · Original publisher: Doubleday, Doran and Company (New York), 1941
