Working Class Heroes: 10 Great Books for the 99%

Many writers, from Edith Wharton to F. Scott Fitzgerald, have focused on the lives of the privileged and the wealthy. While it’s often fun to read about rich people’s problems, it tends to be far more rewarding and insightful to spend time with characters, both fictional and real, who work blue-collar and pink-collar jobs. Here are ten books that offer this much-needed perspective.

1. A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin

How is it possible that Lucia Berlin isn’t as famous as Lorrie Moore, John Updike, and any other well-regarded short story writer? One can only hope that she finds success posthumously (Berlin passed away in 2004). FSG is releasing a collection of her stories on August 18th, edited by Stephen Emerson and with an introduction by Lydia Davis, in which Davis quotes Berlin: “The story itself becomes the truth, not just for the writer but for the reader. In any good piece of writing it is not an identification with a situation, but this recognition of truth that is thrilling.” Berlin wrote the truth, whether she was focused on a cleaning woman or the stories that unfold in Laundromats. She writes in the book’s title story, “Most American women are very uncomfortable about having servants. They don’t know what to do while you are there. Mrs. Burke does things like recheck her Christmas card list and iron last year’s wrapping paper. In August.” It’s remarkable how much she could say in just a few sentences.

2. Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

It’s hard to believe that next year will be the fifteenth anniversary of the publication of Nickel and Dimed. Ehrenreich’s seminal nonfiction book is an incisive and cutting exposé that’s still just as relevant today: a definitive example of immersive journalism. Rather than just writing about poverty, the author worked low-paying jobs, including stints as a maid, a waitress, and a Walmart employee. “The first thing I discovered is that no job, no matter how lowly, is truly ‘unskilled,’ ” she wrote. And while it’s true that she could return to her more privileged life at any moment, Ehrenreich’s experiment emphasized how difficult, discouraging, and exhausting it is to get by on pitiful wages.

3. Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce

Merritt Tierce’s debut novel tells the story of a single mother who works as a waitress at a Dallas steakhouse. She’s the opposite of a goody-two-shoes, a self-destructive young woman trying to make it in the world. But once you encounter Marie, you can’t look away. You’ll even root for her. Tierce’s prose is as bold as a Sharpie, and whether she’s describing a sexual encounter or a shift at a restaurant, the words pulse on the page.

4.Elena Ferrante‘s Neapolitan Novels

The fourth volume in the reclusive author’s critically praised series comes out in September. Set in Italy, the story begins in the 1950s and follows two women over the course of their lives. Narrated by a successful writer named after the author, Elena recounts her complicated friendship with Lila, a ferociously intelligent person who, in the third book, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, struggles to get by as a single mother while working in horrifying conditions at a sausage factory. Ferrante is a master at portraying political protests and corruption — and the turmoil experienced by two women who took different paths.

5. Green Girl by Kate Zambreno

Ruth is a young American woman working as a shop assistant in London. She spends much of her time alternating between hating herself and obsessing over her looks and clothing. “She hardly has enough money to eat. But who needs to eat when you can wear a dress like that? Ruth thinks. Anyway, food gets digested, food goes away. Useless practice. But a dress like that will be forever. A sort of spiritual nourishment, just as fundamental as eat and roof and breathe.” The title connotes the green of money in addition to the naiveté of the character. What are we more consumed by than our own ambitions and dashed hopes?

6. The Door by Magda Szabó

The strongest personality in Magda Szabó’s 1987 novel (reissued by NYRB Classics this year) is the housekeeper Emerence. Narrated by a prominent writer also named Magda, this Hungarian novel is in many ways a love letter to the maid, whose willpower dominates the book. While Magda might have the privilege and prestige, Emerence has a fiery spirit that money can’t buy. Her singular personality is the heart of this book.

7. How to Grow Up by Michelle Tea

Michelle Tea grew up in a working-class family in Massachusetts and spent years in less-than-ideal apartments, paying cheap rent so she didn’t have to work that much and could focus on her writing. “I simply didn’t know how to take care of myself in my twenties,” writes Tea. “I was feral, and I needed a feral cave that allowed me to live in my simple ways.” The road to success doesn’t always include a college degree. How to Grow Up proves that there are many ways (some rockier than others) to achieve one’s dreams.

8. Preparation for the Next Life by Atticus Lish

What to call this book? It’s a love story, but it’s also a portrait of modern-day New York City and its most-put-upon inhabitants. Lish does for NYC what Cormac McCarthy does for the West: he brings alive its conjoined beauty and danger on the page. Preparation for the Next Life is a gritty, utterly realistic portrayal of a Chinese Muslim illegal immigrant (working for pitiful wages at a Chinese restaurant while sleeping on a grungy mattress in a partitioned room) and the man she falls in love with, an Iraq war veteran who suffers from PTSD.

9. Bad Marie by Marcy Dermansky

I read this book when it first was published in 2010, and five years later, the main character still remains one of my favorites in fiction. Marie, fresh out of jail, lands a job as a nanny for her childhood friend’s daughter. She runs off to Paris with the child and the husband, a French novelist: “Benoît Doniel. It tasted good in her mouth, like chocolate. Like chocolate dipped in whiskey.” Who wants to read about well-behaved girls when the naughty ones make for a better story?

10. Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

Long before Anthony Bourdain went behind the scenes of the food industry in Kitchen Confidential, George Orwell revealed what it was like to work in a cafeterie of a Parisian hotel. “Nothing could be easier, on the face of it, than this stupid scullion work, but it is astonishingly hard when one is in a hurry. One has to leap to and fro between a multitude of jobs—it is like sorting a pack of cards against the clock.” Orwell recounts his days spent teetering on the brink of starvation. It’s a classic for a reason, and a book that generation after generation of working class heroes will cherish as fuel for the will to carry on.