Working Men

Working Men is a collection of short stories focusing on fathers and sons navigating their relationships and responsibilities. The characters span different ages, backgrounds, and circumstances across contemporary America. Each story centers on male protagonists dealing with work, family obligations, and personal struggles. The narratives explore both traditional employment and unpaid labor, from construction sites to household duties. The stories examine masculinity, identity, and the inheritance of expectations between generations. Through understated prose and realistic scenarios, the book portrays how men define themselves through their work and family roles. The collection reveals universal themes about duty, connection, and the complex ways people try to understand themselves and their loved ones. Dorris crafts narratives that resist easy answers while maintaining empathy for his characters' predicaments.

This short story collection has limited reader reviews available online, making it difficult to gauge broad reader sentiment. Readers note Dorris's skill at writing from diverse perspectives and capturing personal struggles of working-class characters. Several reviews mention the emotional depth of the father-son relationships depicted. One reader wrote "Dorris shows how men navigate work, family and identity with raw honesty." Critics point to uneven quality across the stories and say some characters feel underdeveloped. A few readers found the writing style overly sparse. Ratings: Goodreads: 3.7/5 (11 ratings) Amazon: 5/5 (2 reviews) The small number of online reviews suggests this 1993 collection has a limited modern readership despite Dorris's prominence as an author of Native American literature. Most discussion focuses on his novels rather than this story collection.

In Country by Bobbie Ann Mason A teenage girl in Kentucky seeks to understand her father who died in Vietnam by connecting with local veterans and exploring the lasting effects of war on rural communities.

Joe by Larry Brown A hardscrabble Mississippi forestry worker forms a bond with a young boy from a troubled home while navigating poverty, alcoholism, and manual labor in the contemporary South.

Rock Springs by Richard Ford Working class characters move through Montana and Wyoming, making choices between responsibility and escape while grappling with family obligations and economic hardship.

The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks A small town deals with collective grief and individual guilt in the aftermath of a school bus accident through the perspectives of multiple blue-collar community members.

Winter in the Blood by James Welch A Native American man on a Montana reservation confronts his identity and family history while moving between manual labor jobs and wrestling with personal loss.

🔖 Michael Dorris was the first single man in the United States to legally adopt a child, adopting his son in 1971 📚 Working Men was published posthumously in 1993, following Dorris's death by suicide 💭 The book explores diverse male perspectives through interconnected short stories, reflecting the author's mixed Native American heritage and experiences teaching on reservations 📖 Several stories in the collection examine father-son relationships, a theme deeply personal to Dorris who discovered his adopted son had fetal alcohol syndrome 🎯 The collection received the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction nomination, though Dorris was already an established non-fiction writer known for The Broken Cord