a world filled with uncertainty-and when has it ever been otherwise?-there is one thing of which you can be sure: You can never have enough books. So one Saturday afternoon soon after I moved to Austin I went trolling for answers in the history and travel sections of a second-hand bookstore, where I found myself staring at two stacks of books slumped against a bin.
They were worn, discarded copies of Out of This Furnace, a three-generation family saga about immigrants from Eastern Europe and the steel mill towns outside Pittsburgh. The novel by Thomas Bell begins with George Kracha, a hapless young man who in the 1880s leaves his home in the easternmost corner of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He arrives penniless in New York, having frittered away his meager savings in an unsucc
When it was first published in 1941, it was heralded as a novel of "the new immigration," or as one critic described it, a portrait of "the America of the newcomer for those who sometimes forget that at one time they too were newcomers." But by 1950 it was out of print and might have faded away forever had it not been rescued many years later by a professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University. Dave Demarest tracked down Bell's survivors and wrote an Afterword for a new edition, which was published in 1976. Since then it has sold more than 150,000 copies. The novel was once listed among the top 10 fictional works published by university presses (Long Day's Journey Into Night, Eugene O'Neill's family saga, was ranked number one.) It appears on countless reading lists in universit
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