working class

John Sayles' new novel 'Crucible' is a sweeping historical epic that takes readers deep into the world of Henry Ford and the Motor City between 1927 and 1945. Sayles casts his net wide across this transformative era, capturing the rise and fall of industrial fortunes, the bitter struggles of workers and union organizers, and the cultural collisions of race, class, and power in America’s heartbeat.

In "Bone of the Bone," Sarah Smarsh brings her graceful storytelling and incisive critique to the challenges that define our times: class division, political fissures, gender inequality, environmental crisis, media bias, the rural-urban gulf. Smarsh, a journalist who grew up on a wheat farm in Kansas and was the first in her family to graduate from college, has long focused on cultural dissonance that many in her industry neglected until recently.

In “Skeleton Crew,” Dominique Morisseau’s third play in her Detroit Cycle, a makeshift family of workers at the last exporting auto plant in the city…

Joan C. Williams is Distinguished Professor of Law and Hastings Foundation Chair at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. Williams’s…