SOURCE: Coles, Nicholas. “Mantraps: Men at Work in Pietro di Donato's Christ in Concrete and Thomas Bell's Out of This Furnace.” MELUS 14, nos. 3-4 (autumn-winter 1987): 23-32.

In the following essay, Coles discusses the representation of immigrant life in all its contradictions in Pietro di Donato's Christ in Concrete and Thomas Bell's Out of This Furnace.

Whether we want it there or not, for most of us work squats at the center of life. It consumes our time and energy and to a large extent determines our experience in every other activity of living. When we are out of work, the lack of it and the search for it takes its place as the dominant condition. One of the continuing uses of literature has been to counteract that dominance, to provide a form of imaginative vacation to other lives and other places governed not by work but by love...