Relax This Weekend With Labor Day Fiction

As I wrote in my blog a year ago about this time, Labor Day is an American federal holiday observed the first Monday in September and I compiled a list of appropriate titles. You can celebrate this Labor Day weekend with additional titles about Labor Day itself, labor disputes, the labor movement, and labor unions.
So, kick back, relax, and try one of the following:

Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Joad family, Okie farmers forced from their dustbowl home during the Depression, try to find work as migrant fruitpickers in California.

Labor Day by Joyce Maynard

Relates a story of love, sexual passion, painful adolescence, and devastating betrayal as seen through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old boy--and the man he later becomes--looking back on the events of a single long, hot, and life-altering weekend.

Welcome to Higby by Mark Dunn

Follows the lives of the residents of Higby, Mississippi, over the Labor Day weekend of 1993.

Sense of Entitlement by Anna Loan-Wilsey

When her job takes her to Newport, Rhode Island, traveling secretary and sleuth Hattie Davish finds herself in the middle of a labor dispute that results in murder, forcing her to search for a killer amongst the town's gentry.

Over and Under by Todd Tucker

Unaware of a labor strife that is affecting both of their fathers, a pair of fourteen-year-old boys enjoy the innocence of a youthful summer in 1979 rural Indiana before local violence changes their world and tests their friendship.

Sea Glass by Anita Shreve

When Honora and Sexton Beecher are rendered penniless by the crash of the stock market, Sexton is forced to work in a nearby mill that is plagued by violence, and as they try to reconstruct their lives, they are confronted by passions of every kind.

Company Man by Robert Jackson Bennett

After eleven union men are found dead in a trolley car in 1919, a man named Hayes must discover the truth behind the murders--and behind the McNaughton Corporation and the Evesden, the company town it built--before he meets a grim end.

Island Walkers by John Bemrose

Living among the other mill workers in the Island, a working-class Ottawa neighborhood, the Walker family faces new challenges as the threat of a mill closure looms.

Mary Barton: a Tale of Manchester Life by Elizabeth Gaskell

Mary Barton is the daughter of a good and upright trade unionist, John Barton. She attracts two men, Jem Wilson, a fellow worker, and Henry Carson, son of her father's employer. When the union men decide upon murder John Barton is the chosen assassin of Henry Carson. Suspicion falls, however, on Jem, and Mary is torn between her lover and her father.

Absolute Rage by Robert Tanenbaum

The murders of an ambitious Teamster and members of his family lands Chief Assistant D.A. Butch Karp on one of his most challenging cases--one that will threaten his own family with violence as he probes into big-city labor corruption.

Storming Heaven by Denise Giardina

In the Battle of Blair Mountain, West Viriginia, in the early 20th century, coal miners fight for unionization under the leadership of Rondal Lloyd and Carrie Bishop, a nurse who helps him before and after her husband's death.

Enjoy your laborlessness, reading style!