The American Century [antikvár]

THOMAS BELL who wrote THE MAN WHO MADE GOOD IN AMERICA was born in 1903 in Braddock, Pennsylvania, the son of an immigrant steel worker. His mother, although born in the United States, was also of Slovak ancestry. His education did not go beyond the first year of high school. At fifteen, he went into the steel mills as an apprentice electrician. Later, he worked as a construction laborer; as a repairman in a railroad shop; as a seaman, and, for a while, in a second-hand bookstore. He is the author of six novels, including all brides are beautiful, out of this furnace, there comes a time. In the man who made good in america, the author dips into the album of his childhood for the people and the milieu he pictures in his story. In the spring of 1910, three men were sitting in a grimy courtyard, talking. All were Slovak steelworkers, fair, solidly-built men in their late thirties. The oldest, Mike Dobrejcak, was wearing slippers and a long-sleeved undershirt; he had got out of bed only an hour or so before, and would soon be going off to a night's work in the blast furnaces. The others, his brother Joe and his best friend Steve Bodnar, were clean-faced and clean-shirted, notice to all the small world of a steel town that they weren't working. Times were bad; not as bad as they had been during the panic three years before, but bad enough. 7