Tom Grogan

Tom Grogan is a novel published in 1896 by the American author, engineer, and watercolorist Francis Hopkinson Smith. The story was first serialized in The Century Magazine beginning in December 1895, with illustrations by Charles Stanley Reinhart; Houghton Mifflin issued it in book form in 1896, and it became one of the best-selling novels in the United States that year. The novel is set against the working life of the dock laborers on Staten Island, New York. After the stevedoring contractor Tom Grogan dies from a work injury, his wife, to keep the family fed, conceals her husband's death, tells everyone he is still recuperating in hospital, and takes over the business in his name, from then on known to all as "Tom Grogan." This strong, cheerful, and capable Irish American woman builds the business into a success, which earns her the jealousy and hostility of rivals: competitors and union representatives use every mean trick against her, even resorting to lawsuits, extortion, arson, and attempted murder. With exceptional courage and resilience she weathers each ordeal. Even as she must toil like a man, she remains above all a mother, ever mindful of her lame young son Patsy and her daughter Jenny, who is experiencing a tender romance. In plain, unadorned prose, the novel reveals a heroic soul beneath a rough exterior and creates a strikingly distinctive portrait of a working woman in late nineteenth-century American literature. This edition is one of the titles included in the English-language original novel collection.