What Happened to Novels about Workers?

An E. J. Dionne opinion piece in the 9/5/11 San Francisco Chronicle says, “We may still celebrate Labor Day, but our culture has given up on honoring workers…and their honest toil.” He goes on to say that workers, and the working class, are now mostly ignored even in literature and the arts. He quotes a 2006 essay by critic William Deresiewicz observing that “we no longer have novelists such as John Steinbeck or John Dos Passos who take the lives of working people seriously.” This comment made me try to think of current authors who write about working life, and I came up with very few. In the past there were Hardy, Dickens, Balzac, Zola, Gaskell, and London, among others; in the more recent past there were Lawrence, Dreiser, Howells, Farrell, Algren, Le Sueur, Richler, Sillitoe and Carver. And nowadays? The list is thinner; those that spring to my mind include Carolyn Chute, Dorothy Allison, Jayne Anne Phillips, Marge Piercy, and Jeannette Winterson. OK, I really didn’t notice until I typed these authors’ names that they were all female. Readers, can you think of authors – male or female – that have recently written more than glancingly or superficially about workers’ lives, particularly working class lives?