The Disinherited by Jack Conroy

First Edition
Inscribed
Book: VG/DJ: Good+
Book has a bit of foxing, binding is very slightly cocked, but otherwise tight and clean.
Dust Jacket had five small chips, a little fading and soil, but is not price clipped.
Covici-Friede, 1933

Where do I begin with this wonderful book? Happy Labor Day.
I found this book at a living-estate sale that looked more like a garage sale than anything else. You'll hate me for my luck, but this was my first visit to an estate/garage sale with the intent to look for books (subsequent tours have proven dismally unsuccessful). I'd missed the first day of the sale and had driven out to where the classified ad directed me early Sunday afternoon.
I saw the book and nearly passed it up because of the soiling, but upon opening the book I saw the inscription, "Best wishes to my friend Joseph Singer -- Jack Conroy," so I thought I'd chance it. Furthermore, I thought I remembered seeing that striking cover before: Murray Levin's depiction of a line of hunched workers, beaten down, sans individuality.
When the woman running the sale saw me eying the book she said that it was her father-in-law's and that there was another book on the table by the same author. I rummaged through a few piles and found a 1935 first edition copy of Conroy's A World to Win, also inscribed. The woman told me that her father-in-law was a novice writer and that he had some poetry published in a few anthologies. I looked interested, but nonchalant, and bought both books for five dollars.
Upon returning home I fired up AbeBooks to see what I'd got and was flabbergasted by what I found: The Disinherited was a rare and seemingly sought-after book. There was (and still is) only one other copy on Abe that was both inscribed and had a dust jacket, and it was going for $1250. Conroy's other title, A World to Win, was being offered for $150 with no inscription. I was very happy, finally having something with which to justify my expensive hobby to my wife.
Yes, my wife was elated when I told her of my find. She went online and used her magic-Googling powers to eek out a connection between Jack Conroy and Joseph Singer. She found a few Joseph Singers in the field of socialist activism in the 1930s, but the name was common, and Jewish social activists were uber-abundant in pre-World War II America.
Finally she came across a database listing the artifacts in a collection of Jack Conroy's writings at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Among the letters listed was one from Joseph Singer addressed to Jack Conroy. She wrote the library and asked for a copy of the letter, which arrived without haste. The letter showed that Mr. Singer lived in Salem, Oregon and was not only an aspiring writer, but a bit of an activist as well. He wrote about attending meetings of the hop-yard workers and passing out copies of Conroy's publication, The Anvil. Singer' also remarked on the great use of diction that helped create terrific characters, like Hans, the machine-crippled auto-worker turned socialist.
I found a reader's copy of The Disinherited published in 1963 at the Night Library on the University of Oregon campus and read it while vacationing in Colorado. The story is of Larry Donovan's life of labor: from working at the Monkey Nest Coal Mine near Moberly, Missouri, to working in the auto factories in Detroit. Larry experiences the hardships of the American laborer, struggling to gain a foothold in a world run by bosses and investors.
Most interesting was Conroy's depiction of the Great Depression. It was disheartening watching young, able men and women have their lives cast into arrested development by a system that had exploited them from the first. Also of note was the impact of the automobile on a populace of striving, hungry people and the descriptions of the Hoovervilles across the country. Coming out in 1933, I can see The Disinherited taking it's place among other populace books like The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and Three Soldiers by Dos Passos. Christopher Buckley comes to mind as a modern author trying to change the world for the better through literature. I just read Boomsday, and while the scenario presented in it isn't as dire (yet) as the one posed in The Disinherited, I like the call to activism presented in it.
I've got to give it to Conroy and those like him, they saw the injustice and set out to change it. His world brings a Bob Dylan quote to mind, "A lot of people don't have much food on their tables, but they got a lot of forks and knives, and they gotta cut something."
Hmm . . . Happy labor day.