Blood on the Forge

Praised by both Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, this classic of Black literature is a brutal depiction of the Great Migration from the Jim Crow South

This brutally gripping novel about the African-American Great Migration follows the three Moss brothers, who flee the rural South to work in industries up North. Delivered by day into the searing inferno of the steel mills, by night they encounter a world of surreal devastation, crowded with dogfighters, whores, cripples, strikers, and scabs. Keenly sensitive to character, prophetic in its depiction of environmental degradation and globalized labor, Attaway's novel is an unprecedented confrontation with the realities of American life, offering an apocalyptic vision of the melting pot not as an icon of hope but as an instrument of destruction.

Blood on the Forge was first published in 1941, when it attracted the admiring attention of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. It is an indispensable account of a major turning point in black history, as well as a triumph of individual style, charged with the concentrated power and poignance of the blues.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: 01/31/2005
ISBN: 9781590171349
Pages: 264
Weight: 0.55lbs
Size: 7.90h x 5.00w x 0.70d

Review Citations: Black Issues Book Review 09/01/2005 pg. 61
Library Journal 03/01/2005 pg. 126
Foreword 03/01/2005 pg. 1