Life and Death of the American Worker

Alice Driver is a J. Anthony Lukas and James Beard Award–winning writer from the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas. Driver is the author of Life and Death of the American Worker, More or Less Dead, and the forthcoming Artists All Around, a memoir about her family’s relationship with Maurice Sendak, the author of Where the Wild Things Are. She is also the translator of Abecedario de Juárez. She lives in the Ozark Mountains.

“From the lush descriptions in the very first pages, it feels clear that Driver has longed to write about the state for some time. …. A work of journalism that seeks at once to draw attention to injustice and to philosophize, insisting on material equity and a specific notion of the good life. Driver frames the book in terms of ‘moral beauty’: an ethic of looking outside oneself, to the Other, in which she locates the good and the just. The work ethic and steadfast organizing of the people she chronicles transcends political activism and approaches something conceptual and timeless. … It’s when she calls on her experience as a reporter and an Arkansan that her doggedness and closeness to the story—and, in turn, her book’s emotional importance—best shine through…. The warmth that Driver must have developed with the people she was chronicling is evident. This rapport puts into practice Driver’s conceptual approach of ‘moral beauty.’ The combination of the two is perhaps the book’s most important contribution…. This book most reminded me of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee and Walker Evans….Driver is a worthy inheritor of this tradition. …. Her lens of “moral beauty” enables her to create art without aestheticizing the workers’ suffering. In part, it’s her training as a literary scholar—and specifically as a scholar of the literature of death in Mexico—that enables her to ground and humanize the exploitation she observes. … No matter how foreclosed the legal possibilities for holding Tyson accountable, Driver demands that the company answer on a higher plane—to see that it has done wrong in the courts of what is human, ethical, and morally beautiful.”—Caroline Tracey, The Nation