William Dale Smith (1926-1986) was an ex-steel worker and ex-Marine, who would later go on to write several acclaimed crime novels as “David Anthony,” one of which, The Midnight Lady and the Mourning Man, became the 1974 movie The Midnight Man, co-directed, co-written, and starring Burt Lancaster.
A lost, literary masterpiece, hailed as "alive with shocking vitality" by the Auburn Journal, is now back in print for the first time in over sixty years....
It's 1960. Over the mills of the huge Craft Steel Company, the sky is ablaze, reflecting the white hot heat of its open-hearth furnaces. But the company and the town its workers live in are a tinderbox, crackling with the tensions of an impending power struggle that will reshape their lives. The heavy guns of the Industrial Workers of America, a new labor organization, are opening fire on the old, corrupt, company-dominated union...and 10,000 steel workers are caught in the crossfire.