William Scotts Troublemakers explores how a major change in the nature and forms of working-class power affected novels about U.S. industrial workers in the first half of the twentieth century. With the rise of mechanization and assembly-line labor from the 1890s to the 1930s, these laborers found that they had been transformed into a class of mass workers who, since that time, have been seen alternately as powerless, degraded victims or heroic, empowered icons who could rise above their oppression only through the help of representative organizations located outside the workplace.

Analyzing portrayals of workers in such novels as Upton Sinclairs The Jungle, Ruth McKenney's Industrial Valley, and Jack Londons The Iron Heel, William Scott moves beyond narrow depictions of these laborers to show their ability to resist exploitation through their direct actionssit-down strikes, sabotage, and other spontaneous acts of rank-and-file troublemaking on the joboften carried out independently of union leadership. The novel of the mass industrial worker invites us to rethink our understanding of modern forms of representation through its attempts to imagine and depict workers agency in an environment where it appears to be completely suppressed.