King Coal
A Novel

This is the story of the lives and deaths of coal miners in the Western United States in the early Twentieth Century. It is about Americans and immigrants in the land of the free, working as slaves, essentially. And then, their fight back. The postscript to this book is essential. In it, the author p......more

You load sixteen tons, what do you get Another day older and deeper in debt Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go I owe my soul to the company store Those lines, composed by Merle Travis and popularized by Tennessee Ernie Ford, pretty much sum up the situation in coal mining that persisted......more

Slavery wasn't ended with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation or with the Union’s defeat of the Confederacy. Well into the Twentieth Century slavery prevailed throughout the United States. True, the buying and selling of human flesh was no longer practiced but the Industrial Revolution enslaved huma......more

I found this book to be a truly captivating representation of the hypocrisy and oppression that the early 20th century coal miners encountered. While the plot is not as notable as his earlier work, The Jungle; King Coal is laced with it's own gruesome depiction of the corruption caused by greed and......more

It’s interesting that an executive of Massey Energy was sentenced for criminal negligence with regard to a coal mine disaster on the very week I finished King Coal, Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel about energy companies (the General Fuel Company), coal miners, and unions. Sinclair’s novel was abou......more