Before he wrote The Cold Millions, Jess Walter had always wanted to tell a story about the dawn of the 20th century in Spokane, Washington. In the early 1900s, the city was the artery for seven major railways, bringing hundreds of people to the city’s doorstep each day. As a child, Walter grew up listening to his grandfather tell stories about train-hopping: “…for a kid who grew up with Treasure Island, it sounded like stowing away on a pirate ship,” Walter remembered. “I wanted to be able to write with that sense of adventure that I remembered [from] those stories, and to make us think about homelessness and poverty in different ways, you know, the way maybe they were thought about 110 years ago” (NPR). It is that desire that animates The Cold Millions: a sweeping story about brotherhood and love, greed and hope, the dignity of work and the rise of the modern labor movement.

The last surviving members of their family, brothers Rye and Gig Dolan land in Spokane after spending a year moving “job to job, week to week, farm to farm, Washington to Oregon to Idaho” (p. 16). In the city, they dodge the grasping hands of the law and exploitative job agencies, making just enough between them to rent an enclosed porch in Little Italy and get the occasional 50-cent seat to see the vaudeville singer Ursula the Great perform, caged with a live cougar. A pensive, steady 16-year-old, Rye yearns for just two things: a reliable job and a home. His brother, Gig, on the other hand, spends his days reading worn volumes of War and Peace and agitating for workers’ rights with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

When Rye follows his brother to a free speech protest led by the IWW, they are both arrested alongside other union organizers. Rye finds himself freed from jail and meets the “redoubtable, estimable, formidable” (p. 79) Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a 19-year-old firebrand from New York—and a real historical figure—working to organize union actions across the West. Flynn sees Rye’s story as a chance to establish a face for the IWW’s fight, and launches him on a whirlwind tour of workers’ halls across Washington. In doing so, she propels him headfirst into the movement that Gig loved, even as Rye wonders what lengths he’d go, and who he’d betray, to save his brother.

Walter has described the novel as a “last-gasp Western” (BookPage): a mythic period of America captured, not in full luster, but in the fading glory of its last wild days. Cohering history with fiction, he renders tropes of the genre in meticulous detail while giving characters a chance to tell their own story: the venal sheriff, the beautiful woman with a hidden past, the jaded killer, the villain and hero caught in a standoff, the stranger who walks into town. In one chapter, the killer chafes against the ceaseless call of “the job.” In another, the sheriff forgives the man who shot him, “…prayed for his soul and mine, sorry we’d been born into such a place” (p. 317). Across the pages of The Cold Millions, Walter introduces villains who kill and save, heroes who sacrifice and betray, women who soothe and incite, families that are made and remade. “No one wins the war,” Flynn tells Rye just before she returns to New York. “Not really. I mean, we’re all going to die, right? But to win a battle now and then? What more could you want?” (p. 336).

-National Endowment for the Arts