Blood on the Forge

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 unprecedneted 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 the poignance of the blues. "In his Bllood on the Forge, William Attaway presents with skill the impact of industrial life on the simple balck folk who fled the plantations of the South... It will add a new and better knowledge of American civilization. The reality that Attaway depicts is not beautiful, but it is none the less moving and human for that." --Richard Wright "Attaway's characters are caught in the force of a struggle which, like steel furnace, roars throughout its pages." --Ralph Ellison "Attaway's artistic genius rivals that of Richard Wright's Native Son. In Blood on the Forge he has contributed to American literature nothing less than a classic." --Barbara L. J. Griffin, Encyclopedia of American Literature.