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Description of  Tim Dayton - Muriel Rukeyser's The Book of the Dead

The Book of the Dead by Muriel Rukeyser was published as part of her 1938 volume U.S. 1. The poem, which is probably the most ambitious and least understood work of Depression-era American verse, commemorates the worst industrial accident in U.S. history, the Gauley Tunnel tragedy. In this terrible disaster, an undetermined number of menlikely somewhere between 700 and 800died of acute silicosis, a lung disorder caused by prolonged inhalation of silica dust, after working on a tunnel project in Fayette County, West Virginia, in the early 1930s. After many years of relative neglect, The Book of the Dead has recently returned to print and has become the subject of critical attention. In Muriel Rukeysers The Book of the Dead, Tim Dayton continues that study by characterizing the literary and political world of Rukeyser at the time she wrote The Book of the Dead.