The Harbor

By Ernest Poole and Patrick Chura

Ernest Poole's bestselling, muckraking classic about the plight of the worker.

 

The best-known novel by the winner of the first Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Ernest Poole's The Harbor was published in 1915 to instant acclaim and remains his most important book. At the heart of the story is Billy, an aspiring writer who struggles to reconcile his sympathy for workers with his middle-class allegiance to capitalist progress. As Billy comes of age on the New York waterfront, an eyewitness to explosive tensions between labor and capital that culminate in a violent strike, he learns to embrace socialism as the solution to the harbor's seething injustices. This novel, one of the most direct literary treatments of class warfare, is a valuable social history and a powerful testament to Poole's legendary talent.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Release date: Dec 27, 2011
• ISBN: 9781101565681

Ernest Poole

Ernest Cook Poole (January 23, 1880 – January 10, 1950) was an American journalist, novelist, and playwright. Poole is best remembered for his sympathetic first-hand reportage of revolutionary Russia during and immediately after the Revolution of 1905 and Revolution of 1917 and as a popular writer of proletarian-tinged fiction during the era of World War I and the 1920s. (Wikipedia)

Reviews for The Harbor

[kylekatz · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

(1915) A well-to-do young man grows up in Brooklyn as the age of sail gives way to the steam age. His father is a shipping magnate, but cannot adjust to the changing times and loses all his money. The young man goes to Harvard and becomes a journalist. He writes about the great men of his class for a while, but gradually gets dragged into the plight of the working class. He writes about a strike of the stokers who make all the new ships go stoking the engines with coal in twelve hour shifts in awful conditions, but he can never quite reconcile his own life of privilege with the suffering he sees around him. In the end he stays pretty safe and nothing really changes, but he thought about the issues a lot. An incredible portrayal of New York's docks and dock workers.