Word: drovers
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Dates: during 1962-1962
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...best damn cook on the Erie Canal, and the timber drover Bigerlow was lofted into song as the Old Ironsides of all Great Lakes barges. Labor songs, in fact, not only chronicled the building of the nation but also played a part in the actual work, from the winch-hauling shanties of New England sailors to the rhythmic songs of the free-swinging lumberjacks of the great Pacific Northwest. There was even a song that helped people put up rail-and-post fences. And in the most often repeated labor song of all-wherein John Henry, the Negro Paul Bunyan...
...present obsession with God and Guilt was still submerged. The rainwater in this novel is the gelid London variety; the central occurrence, around which hints of dark guilt flutter and settle like ravens, is the murder of a policeman. The murderer, a simple, solid workingman named Jim Drover, has been sentenced to hang, despite the fact that the policeman he killed had been about to club his wife in a scuffle at a leftist rally...
...jobless and neither fudge nor genius seemed salable, Greene says that the book is about the injustice of man's justice. It is, but Greene was Greene even then-and his real interest was the vice of man's virtue. Everyone works to win a reprieve for Drover, but motives are messy. His wife is honest enough to know that she could recover from her husband's execution but could not stand the 18 years of withering sexual faithfulness that would follow a jail sentence. The condemned man's Communist friends want propaganda more than...