A wealthy dowager confronts the brutality of the class system and fights for justice in this dramatic account of the Sacco and Vanzetti case With the publication of The Jungle in 1906, Upton Sinclair became the literary conscience of America. Two decades later, he brought his singular artistry and steadfast commitment to the cause of social equality to bear on the case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists accused of armed robbery and murder. Boston, a "documentary novel" published one year after Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, brilliantly combines fact and fiction to expose the toxic atmosphere of paranoia, prejudice, and greed in which the two men were tried. Recently widowed sixty-year-old Cornelia Thornwell abandons her Boston Brahmin family to take a factory job in Plymouth, Massachusetts. She witnesses the crushing poverty and heartless bigotry endured by immigrant laborers, and befriends the charismatic fishmonger Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a committed anarchist and atheist. When Vanzetti and his fellow countryman Nicola Sacco are arrested and charged with murder, Cornelia's belief in the fairness of the American judicial system is shattered. Joining the public outcry heard from Boston to Buenos Aires, she demands a fair trial-but it is too late. As Sacco knew all too well: "They got us, they will kill us." This ebook has been authorized by the estate of Upton Sinclair.
"A history of the Sacco-Vanzetti case truer than the court transcript, more real than any non-fiction account, precisely because it goes beyond the immediate events of the case to bring the reader the historical furnace in which the case was forged."
Howard Zinn Praise for Upton Sinclair
"When people ask me what has happened in my long lifetime I do not refer them to the newspaper files and to the authorities, but to [Upton Sinclair's] novels."
Howard Zinn Praise for Upton Sinclair
"A literary achievement . . . full of sharp observation and savage characterization."
