Writers and Miners: Activism and Imagery in America.

By David C. Duke. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, c. 2002. Pp. [x], 275. $45.00, ISBN 0-8131-2237-6.)

In July 2002 nine miners were trapped in a flooded Pennsylvania mine shaft. The incident held the nation's rapt attention for several days until, miraculously, the men were rescued. The miners were portrayed in the national media as family men who heroically performed dangerous work, and they quickly became celebrities after their triumphant return to the surface.

Americans' knowledge of its mine workers has long come through the media. In Writers and Miners David C. Duke analyzes the last century's worth of images of miners presented in the muckraking press, as well as in novels, poems, films, and plays. Duke effectively argues that most media portrayals have depicted miners as outsiders--or, as he writes, "the other"--but at the same time, most Americans, then and now, have been content to view miners "as objects waiting to be defined rather than subjects capable of defining themselves" (pp. 3-4).

Like the reporters of today who have already forgotten the nine Pennsylvania men, Progressive activists who worked with miners often treated them rather perfunctorily. Similarly, during strikes, while workers returned to their squalid homes, many journalists retired to posh hotels. Duke labels such writers "idiosyncratic" (chap. 1) since their actions clashed with their objectives. Duke also contends (without much supporting evidence) that reformers' sympathetic concerns over mining conditions actually produced very few tangible results.

In subsequent chapters, Duke examines various images of miners that appeared in specific literary genres. Novels provide the best display of his argument concerning "the other." Duke has examined over a hundred coalmining novels published in America over the last century, and he finds that they share in common a view of mining's "dirt, darkness, and danger" (p. 75). His mastery of this literature allows him to show how such novels subtly reflected trends in the culture at large: for example, conservative themes appeared more frequently in the 1920s, and violence often permeated them during the 1960s and 1970s.

In his examination of coal-mining on "stage and screen" (chap. 4), however, Duke's use of contemporary movie guides and popular critics somewhat diminishes the book's scholarly tone. More citations to formal cultural criticism and film theory, or even to the screenplays themselves, would have strengthened this chapter. Also, while the 1980 film about the life of Loretta Lynn, Coal Miner's Daughter, is mentioned in passing, the song on which it was based--perhaps the most famous single American work about miners--is not. Duke's study would have benefited from a chapter on popular music, since many older folk tunes were inspired by mining, and contemporary artists as diverse as Dwight Yoakam and Devo have recorded songs about the subject.

Ultimately, Duke shows that miners do surface occasionally in American popular culture but hardly ever on their own terms. Myths portraying these workers of the underworld as "the other" must be continually reinscribed for new generations, just as Duke has argued in this useful and well-written work.

SEAN MCMAHON

Lake City Community College