Mine Seed

ADVANCE PRAISE for MINE SEED: A powerful story-something extraordinary in literature.- Historian Howard Zinn. . . . comes across as an authentic record of what must have been in part a result of personal experience, family tradition and the dramatic events of the late 19th century here in the greater Scranton area-a valuable record. - Richard Rousseau, University of Scranton Secret meetings hidden in the mountains, informants, agents, spies . . . murder . . . in the Lackawanna Valley deep in the coal fields of Pennsylvania. Anthracite coal fueled the industrial revolution. Poor immigrants and their descendants mined it. Follow the tale through the eyes of three miners in the toughest years of coal history: from the Irish Famine, Lincoln's funeral train, the labor victories Pennsylvania coal miners won - including protecting union members from prosecution under conspiracy laws, to the landmark 1902 anthracite strike in which miners in Scranton, represented by Clarence Darrow, forced industrialists to accept the right of unions to sit at the arbitration table for the first time in United States history.

A great-granddaughter of coal miners in northeastern Pennsylvania, Lucia Dailey tells the story in Mine Seed, from the miners' point of view, of the historically significant and sometimes bloody battle waged by mainly immigrant anthracite coal miners to achieve fair pay and safe working conditions. She holds a BA in modern foreign Languages and an MA in English literature from the University of Scranton. Her other prose works include a study of the feminine archetypes in James Joyce's, Ulysses. She is currently working on a second novel set in World War One and a volume of poetry.