King Coal

What It's About

Hal Warner, the son of a wealthy coal-mine owner, leaves behind his comfortable life to see for himself what conditions are really like in the pits. Taking a job under the false name "Joe Smith," he goes to work in a Colorado coal camp, where he experiences the long hours, dangerous conditions, and casual exploitation faced by the miners and their families. As he grows closer to the mining community, particularly the fiery Mary Burke, Hal is drawn into the workers' struggle against the company that controls every aspect of their lives.

Key Concepts

The novel is grounded in the real 1913-1914 Colorado coal strikes, and it uses Hal's dual position, as both an outsider and eventual insider, to explore class inequality, corporate control over workers' lives, and the human cost of industrial capitalism. As with his earlier writing, Sinclair uses the story to argue for unionization and social reform, presenting the coal company's paternalistic control as a form of exploitation dressed up as order.

About the Author

Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) was an American novelist and journalist closely associated with the muckraking tradition, writing fiction that exposed the abuses of industrial capitalism. He was also active in socialist politics, running for public office in California on several occasions. His writing later earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.