The Bread-winners: A Social Study

by John Hay

"The Bread-winners: A Social Study" by John Hay is a novel published anonymously in 1883. When a violent general strike threatens an American city, wealthy Civil War veteran Captain Arthur Farnham organizes fellow veterans to maintain order against the Bread-winners, a group of discontented workers. Meanwhile, he navigates romantic entanglements with an ambitious carpenter's daughter and a woman of his own social class. This anti-labor novel sparked intense public speculation about its author's identity and reflected tensions between capital and labor in America's Gilded Age.