Horse Shoe Bottoms

Decades after its publication, Tom Tippett’s “Horse Shoe Bottoms” is once more available in this 2008 edition, with a new introduction by journalist Bill Knight, who edited this version. Tippett was an Illinois coal miner, union activist, journalist, New Deal bureaucrat, and educator. His only novel, “Horse Shoe Bottoms” is about Illinois’ coal culture of the late 19th century, when English miners moved to the Illinois River valley. Amid danger and death, strikes and reconciliation, sturdy John Stafford unionizes miners as his wife Ellen copes with the zeal of the workers to organize and her need to improve their home.