The Land of Plenty

New York: Farrar & Rinehart. Very Good. (c.1934). First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [solid but moderately shelfworn copy, light bumping and very slight fraying at several corners, one-time owner's name on front pastedown]. Classic Depression-era novel set in a mill town in the western part of the author's native Washington state (understood to be Aberdeen, but not named in the book itself). Cantwell's second (and last) published novel, cited and discussed extensively by Rideout, who found it "the best from most points of view" out of sixteen novels (his count) that were "particularly concerned with one or more 'class battles'." The author was deeply disturbed in his youth by the IWW-backed labor action in Centralia, Washington, in 1919, which notoriously led to the violent and bloody Centralia Massacre. (Cantwell was eleven years old at the time, and grew up in several towns less than sixty miles from Centralia.) One of the finest examples of a truly proletarian novel, it presents a realistic portrait of the working and living conditions of men and women employed in a veneer factory, that eventually lead them to organize a strike action. .