The Harbor

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.

"Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Frank Norris’s The Octopus and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath are still readable and powerful enough to move the reader, but most other examples of American protest fiction must be soldiered through. To the small company of exceptions should be added The Harbor itself, by Ernest Poole, which Penguin Classics has rescued from oblivion." — Dennis Drabelle, Washington Post Book WorldErnest Poole (1880-1950) was born in Chicago and educated at Princeton. In 1902 he began his writing career as a muckraking journalist, living in a settlement house in the New York slums to further his research into the causes and conditions of poverty. He published twenty-four books, including works of fiction, history, and journalism.
Patrick Chura is an associate professor of English at the University of Akron, Ohio.