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I moved to Pittsburgh in 1991, and it probably wasn’t long afterward that I first heard of “Out of This Furnace.” People often recommended Thomas Bell’s 1941 novel about three generations of a Slovak steel mill family in Braddock for learning local history.
But the book was more than Pittsburgh-famous. Bell, born in Braddock, in 1903, was a nationally known author, and “Furnace,” his fourth novel, was widely reviewed at the time of its publication. Like most novels, it eventually fell out of print; unlike most, it leapt back in, thanks to Carnegie Mellon University English professor David Demarest, who persuaded the University of Pittsburgh Press to issue a new edition, in 1976.
Less diligent than Demarest, it was only this past fall I finally took “Furnace” off my short list of things to read.
The book opens in 1881, with Djuro Kracha arriving in America and eventually making his way to Braddock. Part two follows the lives of his American-born daughter, Mary, and her husband, immigrant Mike Dobrejack. Part three centers on one of their sons, Dobie.
It’s a powerful and affecting novel, suffused with firsthand experience: Bell, born Thomas Belejcak, was the son of immigrant millworkers and toiled in mills himself in the 1910s before departing for New York City and a literary career. He’d be Dobie’s age, and knew the place, culture and history he was writing about from either his own life or the lives of close family members. (Surely few novels contain so much detail about working in an old-school steel mill.)
The characters are lovingly drawn but resolutely life-sized, perhaps especially the flawed Kracha, who’s alternately striving, foolish, and too clever for his own good.
“Furnace” hits notes you might expect, including the absolutely central role played by the mills, with their shift-work rhythms, which are depicted as both sources of (meager) livelihoods and takers of life and limb.
But writing almost journalistically, Bell also never lets you forget that Slovak laborers were widely shunned, and discriminated against inside the mills and out. Several times, characters worry aloud about losing their jobs to new machines, reminding us that fears of technological unemployment didn’t start with AI.
The final third of the book is preoccupied with the 1930s struggle to unionize, which Bell emphasizes didn’t succeed suddenly, with a piece or two of New Deal legislation: It was stretched out for years by corporate resistance, company unions and other obstacles. And with its accounts of the 1892 Battle of Homestead, and other unjust labor practices by mill owners like Andrew Carnegie, “Furnace” provides ample evidence of the need for those unions.
The book’s geography is intimate. Contemporary local readers will be delighted to find a couple mentions of outings to Kennywood (which dates to 1898 — and earlier if you count picnic spot Kenny’s Grove). But especially early in the book, set in the days before streetcars, characters seldom leave their immediate community; Pittsburgh proper might as well be another country, so rarely does it figure in the plot. (You can see the late Demarest himself give a walking tour of the book’s Braddock sites in a 1990 video he made with filmmaker Steffi Domike.)
Here’s Bell describing Kracha walking home one night with a buddy: “There were men ahead of them and behind, a straggling, silent procession. They stumbled over tracks, waited while a dinkey pushed smoking ladles of slag toward the river, then went on. Purple arc lights sputtered through a haze that was three parts soft-coal smoke and one part dust.”
Though underpaid and subject to life-threatening dangers, the workers take deep satisfaction in what they do. That sets up one of the book’s more affecting passages, describing the change in Mike and his co-workers when the general superintendent — “the godlike dispenser of jobs and layoffs, life and death” — comes one day to survey the shop floor:
With his appearance the furnace and the men became separate. It was now his furnace and they its servants, and his; for its well-being they were responsible now not to the furnace and to themselves, their pride in knowing how to handle her, but to him. He took it away from them.
The novel’s action concludes in 1937, just four years before the book was published.
“Out of This Furnace” retains a strong reputation in academia. Its details are authentic enough that in their new history, “Pittsburgh Rising,” University of Pittsburgh professors Edward K. Muller and Rob Ruck use its characters to illustrate the immigrant experience.
And just this past September, thanks to the efforts of Woodland Hills High School library media specialist Kevin McGuire, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission erected a marker in Braddock honoring the novel.
The book’s legacy continues. Don’t wait as long as I did to partake.
