Striking a Chord: A Review of William Scott's Troublemakers: Power, Representation, and the Fiction of the Mass Worker

William Scott's study of working-class literature, Troublemakers: Power, Representation, and the Fiction of the Mass Worker, contributes to the history of the genre in an innovative way, since it takes as its focus fictional depictions of acts of resistance by mass industrial workers at the point of production. Scott offers an original thesis about the proletarian novel through detailed analyses of novels by well-known authors including Upton Sinclair and Jack London, as well as by lesser-known writers including Leroy Scott, Arthur Bullard, Ernest Poole, Lawrence H. Conrad, and Paul Gallico, among others.