Hard Living on Clay Street: Portraits of Blue Collar Families - Softcover

Joseph T. Howell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0881335266 ISBN 13: 9780881335262

Publisher: Waveland Pr Inc, 1990

Synopsis

With 2017 Preface and Epilogue.

In this revealing study of a white working class neighborhood in Washington, D.C., Howell shows us that there is more than one kind of blue collar worker in America today. Hard Living on Clay Street is about two very different blue collar families, the Shackelfords and the Mosebys. They are fiercely independent southern migrants, preoccupied with the problems of day-to-day living, drinking heavily, and often involved in unstable family relationships. Howell moved to Clay Street for a year with his wife and son and became deeply involved with the people, recording their story. As readers, we too become participants in the life of Clay Street, and not just observers, learning what "living on Clay Street" is all about.

Titles of related interest from Waveland Press: Lyon-Driskell, The Community in Urban Society, Second Edition (ISBN 9781577667414) and Singer, The Face of Social Suffering: The Life History of a Street Drug Addict (ISBN 9781577664321).

About this title

Review:

". . . it is above all an intensely immediate, even gripping, account of daily life among the white urban poor." -- Ms. Magazine

"Even more vivid than Tally's Corner, it follows real, if disguised, people through concretely realized days and years." -- The Washingtonian

"In living with and becoming part of what he studies, Howell developed an understanding and compassion that illuminates every page, and which dramatically raise Hard Living from the status of sociologic monograph to a much larger and deeper story of human motivation and striving." --Rolling Stone

"Never again will you find yourself easily able to put down the people whose hopes and fears, dreams and disappointments, violences and loves, inhabit this book." --The New Republic

"No soap opera tangles the gold web of life more effectively than these genuine humans do, and not half so fast." --Washington Post

About this edition

• Publisher: Waveland Pr Inc
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0881335266
• ISBN 13: 9780881335262
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 405