Language English Publication date 1953 Pages 511 Genre Proletarian literature OCLC 220887147 | Publisher Paul List Verlag Media type Print (Paperback) Originally published 1953 Page count 511 Country East Germany | |
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Goldsborough is a proletarian novel by the German-American writer Stefan Heym.
It depicts a coal miners’ strike during 1949-1950 set in the fictional Goldsborough, Pennsylvania, a company town near Pittsburgh. The protagonist is Carlisle Kennedy, head of a large family and himself a miner. When the local union chief fails to take action against the company, Kennedy leads a wildcat pit strike.
Stefan Heym, a refuge from Hitler’s Germany and a naturalized American, began this novel in the United States after doing site visits with coal miners in Western Pennsylvania, but McCarthyism drove him to East Germany, where he finished writing it in 1952. The book was written and first published in English, in Leipzig, and released by an American publisher a year later, as well as in a German translation.
Heym renounced his American citizenship in response to the beginning of the Korean War and lived in East Germany until his death.