Lincoln Lecturer publishes new critical edition

Dr. Owen Clayton, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, has published a new critical edition of the works of T-Bone Slim, a prolific workers’ newspaper columnist and musician who rode the rails during the Great Depression. Slim wrote humorous and polemical prose, poetry, and song, engaging with topics like labour and class injustice, from 1920 until his death in 1942.

“The Popular Wobbly” is a significant contribution to literature about working-class writers, the radical labour movement, and the history and culture of nomadism and precarity. With this publication, Slim’s rediscovered writings can once again inspire artists and activists to march and agitate for a more just and equitable world.

Praise for the book:

“With switchblade wit, the great IWW provocateur T-Bone Slim skewered injustice and uplifted the working class.”—Tom Morello (Rage Against the Machine)

“T-Bone Slim was a really impressive person who should be much better known. This anthology shows that his words and ideas are still relevant today.”—Noam Chomsky

“This is lost wisdom.”—Billy Bragg

“It remains impossible to reproduce T-Bone Slim’s matchless wordplay and invention of language. . . . We believe his madcap humor and sober truths because his brilliance hews so closely to our everyday experiences.”—David Roediger

“T-Bone Slim wrote the way an arsonist sets fires.”—Franklin Rosemont

See: https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517914950/the-popular-wobbly/

Story submitted by Owen Clayton
oclayton@lincoln.ac.uk