History’s shadow can be longer than one might think. Eight decades ago, a thirty-year-old African-American Communist writer published a bold and alarming dramatization of the social costs of capitalism and racism at the time of the Great Steel Strike in 1919. Failing to recognize common class interests, African-American and Euro-American workers were at each other’s throats.

Today, in a polarized era of anti–Black Lives Matter backlash and a union movement struggling to be reborn, it’s hard to think of another work of imaginative literature that reminds us so vividly of the deep relationship between racism and class oppression. Written in an audacious and colorful style, at times more expressionistic than realistic, William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge is a masterclass in how novels can be an alternative archive, a conduit for the preservation, transmission, and elucidation of the experience of oppressed people. In five scintillating parts, the novel follows the lives of three African-American sharecroppers, the Moss brothers, who are uprooted from rural Kentucky and hurled into the industrial inferno of Western Pennsylvania.

As with all literature, the landscape of Blood on the Forge expresses an interplay between the author’s biography and imagination. The characters and events grew partly out of field research and interviews, but also from the novelist’s personal circumstances, radical commitments, and literary sensibility. Some passages may even provide glimpses of a shadow self.