Books like The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists
Frank Owen, a skilled house painter in the seaside town of Mugsborough, works alongside men who defend the system that keeps them poor, and tries to talk them into socialism over their tea breaks.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists
Howards End
The idealistic Schlegel sisters, the wealthy, practical Wilcoxes and a struggling clerk, Leonard Bast, become entangled over a country house and a disputed bequest, in a novel about who will inherit England.
Salka Valka
Salka Valka arrives as a little girl with her destitute mother in an Icelandic fishing village, where she grows up tough, poor and in thrall to the merchant who owns everything.
The Research Magnificent
White, a novelist, sorts through the papers of his friend William Porphyry Benham, who spent his life trying to work out how to live without fear, jealousy or pettiness, and tells his story.
Sinister Street
Michael Fane, born in the 1880s to a mother who is often away and a father he never sees, grows up in Kensington with his sister and their nurse, and goes on to school in West London.
In Dubious Battle
Jim Nolan, a young Communist recruit, goes with the seasoned organiser Mac to a California valley to lead the apple pickers in a strike against the growers.
The Atom Station
Ugla, a country girl from the north, comes to Reykjavík to work as a maid in the house of a member of parliament, just as Iceland argues over selling the Americans a base.
The Promised Land
In the booming textile city of Łódź in the 1880s, three friends, a Pole, a German and a Jew, scheme to build a factory of their own in a place where everything is for sale.
A Room with a View
A young woman visits Florence and discovers that passion and spontaneity offer more than the propriety she was raised to value.
Babbitt
George F. Babbitt, a prosperous real-estate man in the booming Midwestern city of Zenith, lives by the rules of business, boosterism and conformity, until something in him begins to rebel.
The Grapes of Wrath
A dispossessed Oklahoma family drives west to California during the Dust Bowl, finding not the promised land but exploitation, hunger, and the limits of dignity.
The Casual Vacancy
When parish councillor Barry Fairbrother dies suddenly in his forties, his empty seat sets off a war in the pretty English town of Pagford, where rich and poor, parents and teenagers, are each hiding something.
A Handful of Dust
A contented English squire devoted to his Gothic country house loses his wife to an idle young social climber, and his life comes apart all the way to the Amazon.