Introduction to Focus: The Fiction of the Workers

This Focus Issue has nothing to do with a bunch of—what do you want to call us?—rednecks, white trash, working poor, working class, lower-middle class, lower class, what-the-hell-ever writers. None of us likes any of these terms. It’s like trying to find a name for any minority group: all the names are offensive, since they only indicate that we’re not as respected, not as good as the rich white people who tell us what to do. It has everything to do with the availability of higher education between the end of WWII and the end of the Cold War under Reagan and how it has changed American, and perhaps World, literature. No longer do trust fund babies have a monopoly on great writing, though they do have a monopoly on the big publishing houses, including the bigger small presses.

Of course, America has a long tradition of writers who have not come from wealth—Herman Melville, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Erskine Caldwell, Eugene Di Donato, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison. But since WWII, this tradition has exploded. Since World War II, for the first time in history, people who weren’t rich got to go to college, to universities, en masse. The GI Bill funded Norman Mailer and Robert Coover, for instance, who went to fine universities (Harvard, the University of Chicago). It funded the young star Joseph Haske. It funded Paul Ruffin’s education.

Most of my generation got to go to public universities for virtually nothing. Community colleges in California, where I grew up, were free. My college, California State University, Hayward, charged me $72 bucks a semester to go to school, and back then I was making twenty grand a year as a union construction worker just during summers and Christmas and spring breaks. I got to study like a rich kid, and I did. And that’s what Ron Cooper, did, and Joe Haske, and Michael Gills, and Larry Fondation, and Juan Ochoa, and William Hastings and Marc Watkins, and Patrick Michael Finn, and Steve Davenport. Barry Hannah. Harry Crews. Tom Franklin. Donald Ray Pollock. Chris Offutt. Dagoberto Gilb. The critic and editor Daniel Mendoza and many more. Our ranks are, for now, swollen.

This is now ending, however. With the de-funding of state colleges and universities, tuition is no longer affordable for working-class kids. They have to take out tens of thousands of dollars in student loans. If I were eighteen today, I’d have to stay a construction worker. The tuition at the state university I attended is now over ten grand a year, more than I could make today as a teenager, and so I’d be screwed. This era, unique in the history of man, about forty years, of the working-class novel, the working-class writer or artist or any sort, will be over when my generation dies. Working class people will not go to college, will work minimum wage jobs, and sure as hell will not write books about those jobs.

Eric Miles Williamson, Focus Editor.

I’ve been editing literary journals, Gulf Coast, Chelsea, American Book Review, Boulevard, Texas Review, Pleiades, and many others, since 1984. What I noticed was that slowly, and with increasing frequency, writers from modest backgrounds were telling their stories, writing their poems, publishing their essays. People like Phil Levine and Barry Hannah and Harry Crews were getting published and becoming professors. I’d get the typical Updike-like New Yorker style stories about existential angst and middle-class people bemoaning their personal relationships, sometimes superbly written, and I’d loathe them, thinking Get A Job And Stop Whining, and so instead I’d publish a talented writer, perhaps less skilled, who told a story about the working class from which he or she had come. Many of these authors I saw into publication (or reviewed for major venues) became associates, and sometimes friends. We started to coalesce into a ragtag community, paying attention to each other as we became aware...