Glimpses of Life in the Factory

Harvey Swados’s On the Line appeared in the fall of 1957, barely noticed among the long-running best sellers of the day, By Love Possessed, Peyton Place, and On the Beach, or among the works of fiction that were just beginning to catch public attention, On the Road and Room at the Top. Swados’s collection of eight interlocking stories of men working on an assembly line in a New York area automobile plant lacked the shock appeal or the e...