Autobiography of Mother Jones

In 1867, yellow fever stole everything Mary Harris Jones had: her husband and four young children. Instead of breaking her, it forged her into something unstoppable. For the next half-century, she became the voice the powerful feared and workers desperate needed: Mother Jones. This autobiography chronicles her relentless crusade across America's mining camps, steel mills, and picket lines. She helped birth the United Mine Workers and the Industrial Workers of the World. She organized children into protest marches when their fathers were shot down. She faced down mine owners, governors, and presidents with nothing but words and sheer refusal to look away. The book pulses with her fury at injustice and her profound love for the working people she fought beside. Clarence Darrow called it "probably the most readable book in the whole field of American labor history," but it's more than that: it's the testament of a woman who transformed personal grief into collective power, and who refused to let America forget the bodies buried beneath its prosperity.