87 books like Lamps at High Noon

If you want to learn about the New Deal’s contributions to the arts, there’s no better place to begin than with the art itself. This lavish book—I keep it displayed on my coffee table—collects hundreds of color posters created by the WPA’s Federal Art Project, which put unemployed artists and designers to work during the Depression. It’s no wonder that many of these posters, mostly silkscreen, have been cherished by collectors for years: they’re beautifully designed, often quite striking, and sometimes funny. And like most of the WPA’s cultural endeavors, they were meant to serve the public good. Flip through this book and you’ll find advertisements for national parks, a reminder to brush your teeth, and a warning to always report dog bites!  

When Harry Hopkins, the head of the WPA, needed someone to run the Federal Theater Project, he made a bold choice: Hallie Flanagan, a visionary director, dramatist, and critic. Flanagan is at the center of Furious Improvisation, Quinn’s lively and deeply researched history of the FTP. Quinn’s propulsive narrative never flags, even as she showcases the project’s many triumphs, such as the “Living Newspaper” productions dramatizing current events, or Orson Welles’s so-called “voodoo Macbeth” featuring Black actors. But these productions and others were highly controversial, and the project was eventually attacked by the House Un-American Activities Committee. When a defiant Flanagan told the committee that she was fighting against the “un-American inactivity” imposed by the Depression, they ignored her—but this book stands as a monument to her achievements.   

Today, most people know Zora Neale Hurston as a novelist, thanks to her classic Their Eyes Were Watching God. But she was also an accomplished folklorist, anthropologist, playwright, and essayist. And yet, by the late 1930s, she was broke, and she found work with both the Federal Theater Project and Federal Writers’ Project. This book collects Hurston’s writing for the FWP in her home state of Florida, along with an incisive essay by Pamela Bordelon. The sheer variety of material on display here wasn’t unusual for the FWP: you’ll find essayistic meditations on folklife and art, collections of tall tales and children’s songs, and sketches of labor in the turpentine camps and citrus groves—as well as a chilling report on a racist massacre in Ocoee. 

This is a scholarly work, but don’t let the unassuming title fool you: Stott’s writing is crisp, elegant, and highly readable, and his insights are crucial to any understanding of the New Deal’s place in American culture. He covers the Roosevelt administration’s cultural undertakings—from the WPA projects to Farm Security Administration photographers to FDR’s own political style and “documentary imagination”—but his real subject is the broader documentary impulse that was expressed so forcefully and variously during the 1930s. This impulse was hardly confined to the federal government’s interventions in the arts. The connections he draws between the New Deal and, say, Martha Graham’s dance productions, or James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, are illuminating and convincing. 

This is a novel published by Ken Kesey in 1964. Not only is it one of the best books to understand personality, but it is one of the best novels ever. It tells the story of an American family whose patriarch, Henry Stamper, is a classic narcissist. Stamper could be described as a confident, callous, Controlling Wanderer. He is an independent logger and owns his home and business on a river on the central coast of Oregon. He defies the small town, his neighbors, and the national union. His behavior ultimately leads to much pain and suffering. However, Henry has a good time.

The writing is poetic and insightful. All the characters' personalities are well fleshed out. It is the story of America coming of age in the '50s and '60s. Today, sixty years later, America's culture is changing; but personalities remain as they've always been. Personality is the bedrock… show more.

I’ve always been a sucker for a good labor strike.

But a labor strike of Black women in the South—only a decade removed from slavery—demanding dignity, equality, and a living wage so they could simply “enjoy their freedom” in a region where a rich, white, slaveholding regime was just recently toppled? That’s next-level stuff.

Hunter tells the story of this Black female majority who worked in domestic labor in the years following the Civil War. Can you imagine going to work as a wage-earning domestic laborer in the home of your former owner? And then collectively organizing to demand that “freedom” actually means something in this godforsaken region?

Come for the organized labor protests. Stay for the moment these women pack their bags and move to the North seeking the joy and pleasure they deserve.

When I read this book, I knew plenty about Martin Luther King’s ties to the labor movement. What I did not know—and what it took Honey twenty years to piece together—was an understanding of the 1,200 workers whose desperate straits and courageous creative nonviolence called King to Memphis in 1968. Honey uncovers the small triumphs hidden from view if we only look at the large tragedy of King’s assassination. Sanitation workers fought for safer working conditions, adequate wages, and trade union recognition from a city administration that literally treated them like garbage. A labor dispute transformed into a nonviolent community revolt. I remain in awe of the book’s richly textured portraits, among them Reverend Ralph Jackson, a peaceful protester brutalized by police, who forged a "campaign to end police brutality and improve housing, jobs, wages, and education across the city."

The most gaping hole in most people’s knowledge of American history is labor history. Everyone knows the wars and the civil rights movement, but few people know the bloody, grinding struggles that went into giving us all the eight-hour workday and basic protections on the job.

Erik Loomis’s book builds a coherent vision of how major strikes have shaped this nation every bit as much as better-known movements have. This is one book that will open your eyes to the battles that went into many things we all take for granted.

The title of this book hooked me right out of the gate: Brave Girl. I knew it was a story for me. How could it not be? Young Clara Lemlich stood only 5 feet tall, but she was a spitfire. Her story will inspire boys and girls alike when they learn how she fought for equality, raising her voice against powerful factory owners in the early 1900s. Another reason this book is such a treat is that it was illustrated by Melissa Sweet, one of the most creative children’s book illustrators around. The art in this book is a feast for the eyes!

Kirsten Swinth’s fantastic new book argues that our understanding of feminism as asking women to have it all is deeply misunderstood. The second wave did want women to be able to balance their lives as homemakers and workers, but not by having a double shift. Instead, they wanted women’s household burden to be shared—by their husbands, by employers, by the government, and by society as a whole. Swinth shows how feminists tried to deploy the philosophy that “the personal is political” against the problem of laundry and other household tasks. Wives’ strategies ranged from household labor strikes (Don’t Iron While the Strike Is Hot! was the motto of the Women’s Strike for Equality) to drawing up their own individual marriage contracts. These homespun contracts delineated a fairer division of household labor between husbands and wives. Swinth shows that despite these measures and some legal successes, women nonetheless mostly retained their… show more.