The Grapes of Wrath is an American realist novel written by John Steinbeck and published in 1939. The book won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and it was cited prominently when Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962.
Michael Royko Jr. was an American newspaper columnist from Chicago, Illinois. Over his 30-year career, he wrote more than 7,500 daily columns for the Chicago Daily News, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Chicago Tribune. A humorist who focused on life in Chicago, he was the winner of the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for commentary.
Louis "Studs" Terkel was an American writer, historian, actor, and broadcaster. He received the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1985 for The Good War and is best remembered for his oral histories of common Americans, and for hosting a long-running radio show in Chicago.
The Federal Writers' Project (FWP) was a federal government project in the United States created to provide jobs for out-of-work writers and to develop a history and overview of the United States, by state, cities and other jurisdictions. It was launched in 1935 during the Great Depression. It was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal program. It was one of a group of New Deal arts programs known collectively as Federal Project Number One or Federal One.
Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche is a book by Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami about the 1995 Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. The book is made up of a series of interviews with individuals who were affected by the attacks, and the English translation also includes interviews with members of Aum, the religious cult responsible for the attacks. Murakami hoped that through these interviews, he could capture a side of the attacks which the sensationalist Japanese media had ignored—the way it had affected average citizens. The interviews were conducted over nearly a year, starting in January 1996 and ending in December of that same year.
Pantheon Books is an American book publishing imprint. Founded in 1942 as an independent publishing house in New York City by Kurt and Helen Wolff, it specialized in introducing progressive European works to American readers. In 1961, it was acquired by Random House, and André Schiffrin was hired as executive editor, who continued to publish important works, by both European and American writers, until he was forced to resign in 1990 by Random House owner Samuel Irving Newhouse, Jr. and president Alberto Vitale. Several editors resigned in protest, and multiple Pantheon authors including Studs Terkel, Kurt Vonnegut, and Barbara Ehrenreich held a protest outside Random House. In 1998, Bertelsmann purchased Random House, and the imprint has undergone a number of corporate restructurings since then. It is now part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group under Penguin Random House.
James Thomas Farrell was an American novelist, short-story writer and poet.
Barbara Kopple is an American film director known primarily for her documentary work. She is credited with pioneering a renaissance of cinema vérité, and bringing the historic French style to a modern American audience. She has won two Academy Awards, for Harlan County, USA (1977), about a Kentucky miners' strike, and for American Dream (1991), the story of the 1985–86 Hormel strike in Austin, Minnesota, making her the first woman to win two Oscars in the Best Documentary category.
Claiborne Paul Ellis was an American segregationist turned civil rights activist and trade union organizer. Ellis was at one time Exalted Cyclops, local leader, of a Ku Klux Klan group in Durham, North Carolina, the city where he was born.
Working is a musical with a book by Stephen Schwartz and Nina Faso, music by Schwartz, Craig Carnelia, Micki Grant, Mary Rodgers, and James Taylor, and lyrics by Schwartz, Carnelia, Grant, Taylor, and Susan Birkenhead.
Fred James Cook was an American investigative journalist, author and historian who has been published extensively in The Nation, the Asbury Park Press andThe New York Times. He wrote from a contemporary perspective about the Hindenburg disaster, Alger Hiss, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Barry Goldwater, the Watergate scandal and numerous other political issues and current events. He has also written about historic events such as the American Revolutionary War, P.T. Barnum, the Pinkertons and Theodore Roosevelt.
John Leonard was an American literary, television, film, and cultural critic.
Claude Clossey Williams (1895–1979) was a Presbyterian minister active for more than 50 years in civil rights, race relations, and labor advocacy. He worked with the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, founded the People's Institute for Applied Religion, and served as the national vice president of the American Federation of Teachers. He was also the director of Commonwealth College in Mena, Arkansas, from 1937–1939.
Charles Vernon Hamilton was an American political scientist, civil rights leader, and the W. S. Sayre Professor of Government and Political Science at Columbia University.
Jessie Lopez De La Cruz was a Chicano American farm worker, the first female recruiter for the UFW, an organizer and participant in UFW strikes, a community organizer, a working mother, and a delegate to the 1972 Democratic National Convention. She ran the first UFW Hiring Hall, was an adviser to the California Commission on the Status of Women, and the secretary treasurer of National Land for People. Lopez-De La Cruz is also known for her work banning the short-handled hoe, her work educating fellow farm workers, her work promoting co-op farming, and her commitment to fighting injustice for the working poor.
The Calutron Girls were a group of young women—mostly high school graduates—who had joined the Manhattan Project at the Y-12 National Security Complex located at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, from 1943 to 1945. Although they were not allowed to know at the time, they were monitoring dials and watching meters for calutrons, mass spectrometers adapted for separation of uranium isotopes for the development of nuclear weapons for use during World War II. The enriched uranium was used to make the "Little Boy" atomic bomb for the Hiroshima nuclear bombing on August 6, 1945.
Wallace Rasmussen was an American businessman and prominent philanthropist. Hired at Beatrice Foods Company in 1934 as an ice hauler, Rasmussen served as president and then chairman and chief executive officer of the former international food conglomerate, Beatrice, from 1976 until his retirement in 1980. Rasmussen rose to the top of the business with just a high school diploma.
Critique of work or critique of labour is the critique of, or wish to abolish, work as such, and to critique what the critics of works deem wage slavery.
Working: What We Do All Day is a four-part Netflix documentary series regarding the work lives of various people in the United States, with each episode focusing on a socio-economic stratum of society. Barack Obama narrates the documentary, which also involves him interviewing some of the people featured in the episodes. The documentary is inspired by Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, the 1974 nonfiction book by Studs Terkel.
