Steel City: Urban and Ethnic Patterns in Gary, Indiana, 1906-1950 Book

Very much worth revisiting if you've read it before--very much worth discovering if you haven't. A tense and meticulously told true crime story with real journalistic care about a profile act of racial violence (with more than a little police complicity) in Detroit in and around the 1967 riots.

Hersey was an interesting and versatile writer. His portfolio is diverse--both lyrical and pragmatic, but in this work he opened important doors for the hard-edged reporting style of prose into the new more complex sociological terrain of the Civil Rights/there's a riot goin' on era.

This book can be enjoyed as a stand-alone novel...or as part of the "muckraking" social advocacy stream in American literature, which dates back in it strength to the 1870s.

I think Hersey is a writer, famous in his day, who deserves reappraisal. He did a lot of different things well. Not easily categorized in the totality of his work, which may be why he's not appreciated as much as he should be.