\""You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand\"": Culture, Ideology, and Action in the Gastonia Novels of Myra Page, Grace Lumpkin, and Olive Dargan (Literary criticism and cultural theory)

First published in 2007. In early 1929, two organizers for the American Communist Party's recently established National Textile Worker's Union (NTWU) journeyed south by motorcycle to investigate the potential for beginning organizing work among textile workers in the Piedmont region. One of these organizers, Fred Beal, decided to try his luck in Gastonia, North Carolina, which had been described to him as key to organizing the South In a chain of events whose rapidity and magnitude took Beal by surprise, workers at the Loray mill became embroiled in a Communist-led strike that would eventually focus national and even international attention on Gastonia. This book focuses on Myra Page, Grace Lumpkin, and Olive Dargan—the three authors of Gastonia novels who penetrate most incisively into the working-class experience beneath historical and political accounts of the strike and its larger context. The Will To Win : Working-class Culture And Resistance In Myra Page's Gathering Storm, A Story Of The Black Belt -- You Factory Folks Who Sing This Rhyme Will Surely Understand : Cultural Representations In To Make My Bread -- Nothing Is Right, But Everything Is Going To Be : Pre- And Post-revolutionary Culture In Olive Tilford Dargan's Call Home The Heart And A Stone Came Rolling. Wes Mantooth. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 225-232) And Index.