Out of This Furnace is technically an historical novel, but it could also be considered a memoir, or a semi-autobiographical fiction, because American novelist Thomas Bell based the plot and the characters on his own family and their experiences as immigrants from Eastern Europe. Bell's ancestors were Slavs and Slavic-Russians, known as Rusyns, who spoke a Russian dialect that was a hybrid of Russian and Slavic languages. The novel is set in a steel town east of Pittsburgh at the end of the nineteenth century and follows a family of immigrants from their journey to America up until the start of World War II.
The main subject of the novel is the attempted unionization of the steel industry, the first steel strikes at the end of the century, and the 1930s, before war broke out. The main theme of the novel is poverty, and the way in which financial adversity seemed to lead to tragedy in all other areas of life.
The novel was published in 1941, and quickly became Bell's best known, but it fell out of favor after the war, when people craved literature and film with more optimistic leanings after all that had been experienced and suffered. In 1970 David P. Demarest, a writer and professor whose main field of interest was organized labor and the history of unionization, rediscovered the novel and arranged for it to be re-published by the University of Pittsburgh, feeling that it was relevant to the local area, even if publishers generally did not share his enthusiasm about its relevance to the country as a whole. As schools began to devote entire subject areas to the intertwining histories of immigration and unionization, the book became required reading in literature classes as it was recognized as one of the very first authentic working class novels.
Bell enjoyed certain success as a novelist in the 1930s before penning Out of This Furnace. His 1936 novel, All Brides are Beautiful, was far more successful as a film than it was as a book. Another of his novels, the 1943 fiction Til I Come Back To You, was adapted into a play called The World is Full of Girls, a title which, unsurprisingly, drew men to the theater in droves.
In the 1950s Bell and his wife re-located to California where they lived until 1961. His memoir, In the Midst of Life, was finished just before his death, and was published posthumously. Out of this Furnace was performed by the Unseam'd Shakespeare Company in 2011 as part of Pittsburgh's 250th Anniversary celebration.
