The Moments Lost A Midwest Pilgrim's Progress [Paperback]

Franklyn Shivs is a Wisconsin farm boy with a mind too vigorous, too full of desire, for a life on the farm. Leaving home as a young man, he heads south to turn-of-the-century Chicago, a city untamed and turbulent enough to challenge each of his dreams and talents. There he becomes a newspaper reporter, rising through the masthead and learning the back alleys, the tavern manners, the corruption and conflict that underlie the city's grandeur. Dispatched to Northern Michigan to cover the bloody copper mine strike of 1913, he falls in love with the strike's most militant leader, the estranged wife of one of the miners. Their affair forces him to choose between principle and passion, a decision likely to affect the outcome of the strike and the future of the labor movement. With careening, virtuosic prose, Bruce Olds brings to full-blooded life a watershed moment in American history through the experience of a distinctly American protagonist.

Shines a bright, brave light . . . on one of the darkest chapters in our nation's labor history. Chicago Tribune

Olds has achieved something extraordinary. . . . A masterly narrative that equals the best of John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy. The Capital Times (Madison)

At its best, acrobatically beautiful and remarkably penetrating . . . Exquisite, violent detail. Publishers Weekly

Olds writes like a lunatic thesaurus come to life. Booklist

BRUCE OLDSis the author of two novels:Bucking the Tiger, an ALA Notable Book adapted for the stage asThe Confessions of Doc Holliday; andRaising Holy Hell, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and an IMPAC Dublin Literary Award nominee that was also named Novel of the Year by the Notable Books Council of the American Library Association and winner of the QPB New Voices Award for Fiction. His nonfiction work has appeared inGrantaandAmerican Heritage,among other publications, and has been anthollƒ"