Working It Out

Set in the industrial Midwest, this novel tells an essential story of people struggling through economic and personal adversity. It captures the working class capacity for endurance and working it out together. Featured here are the winning characters and setting of Smith's acclaimed novella Beyond Rust.

"I like Beyond Rust and find it very affecting--Good strong language, and a big heart shining through."
--Sy Safransky, editor, The Sun.

On Working It Out:
"Working It Out is a rich, moving story of one man's attempts to work out what we all have to work out, regardless of our personal histories--the precarious balance between where we've come from and where we're going, between the demands of work and family, between who we are, and who we want to be."
--Jim Daniels, author of Blessing the House, and Punching Out.

"Larry Smith's novel, Working It Out, like Studs Terkle's interviews and Kenneth Patchen's poetry, gives us stirring insight into the troubled souls of America's working class. as we watch these men and women of diverse ethnic richness and heritage struggle valiantly with poverty, disappearing jobs and discrimination, we see deeply into the nature of their despair. Yet the fierce, enduring love between Marco and wife Maria, the supportive caring and loyalty of their families as the birth of their first child draws near, gives us, against all odds, blessed hope for the future of humanity. This is the novel of a poet and seer. Mark it well. In such works lie the salvation of our nation."
--Annabel Thomas, author of Knucklebones and The Phototropic Woman.

Larry Smith is a native of Mingo Junction, Ohio, in Appalachia's Panhandle region of the Ohio River Valley. A graduate of Mingo Central High School, Muskingum College, and Kent State University, he has authored seven books of poetry, a book of memoirs, three books of fiction, two biographies of authors Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Kenneth Patchen, and two books of translations from the Chinese. Now a professor emeritus of Bowling Green State University's Firelands College, he is the director of The Firelands Writing Center there and of Bottom Dog Press. Smith has received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council, and a Fulbright Lectureship in American Literature to Italy. He and his wife Ann are the parents of three adult children, and live along the shores of Lake Erie in Huron, Ohio.