Out of This Furnace
North Braddock, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Set mainly in Braddock, Thomas Bell’s 1941 novel follows three genera-tions of an immigrant Slovak family here. Bell drew on personal history, including a job at Edgar Thomson Steel Works, to create this vivid depiction of working-class life in industrial Pittsburgh.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Thomas Bell's 1941 novel Out of This Furnace follows three generations of a Slovak immigrant family in the steel town of Braddock, where the mills ran day and night. Bell drew on his own life—including work at the nearby Edgar Thomson Steel Works—to render the hardships and hopes of immigrant labor with unusual authenticity. The book endures as one of American literature's most vivid portraits of working-class industrial Pittsburgh.
Why it matters
The novel gave voice to the immigrant steelworkers whose labor built industrial America, preserving in fiction a working-class experience often left out of official histories.
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Related people
- · Thomas Bell
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
The Great Steel Strike of 1919
Braddock, PA · est. 1994
By 1919 the mills around Braddock were the beating heart of American steel, and that autumn more than 350,000 workers walked off the job in the largest strike the nation had yet seen. Immigrant laborers demanding union recognition and an end to the grueling twelve-hour day found an ally in Rev. Adalbert Kazincy of St. Michael's, who opened his church as a rallying place when public halls were closed to them. After fifteen bitter weeks the strike collapsed, and organized labor in steel would not recover for another generation.
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1909 McKee's Rocks Strike
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