Steel City brings you the cauldron that is Pittsburgh in the 1890s when the steel business made the city the industrial capital of not just the country, but the world. Through the eyes of Jamie Dalton, we witness the titanic events of that city in that age: the Johnstown Flood that killed more people than any U.S. natural disaster of the 19th century; the Homestead Steel Strike of 1892 when Henry Clay Frick sent in an army of Pinkertons to break the back of the labor movement; an anarchist’s assassination attempt on Frick in revenge for Homestead; the fight-to-the death between Frick and Andrew Carnegie for control of the country’s predominant steel company; and the inside story of what is still the largest corporate buy-out of all-time.

In this historical fiction novel Jamie, his father Richard, his mother Eleanor, and Pittsburgh society, high and low, navigate the social and economic issues of the late nineteenth century that still resonate today: corporate versus individual responsibility, labor relations, suffrage, income inequality, substance abuse, media ethics. From corporate tycoons and wealthy bankers to steel workers and anarchists Steel City portrays the rich panoply of that era.

This is not a gilded age novel. It’s a novel of the smoke and grit that was the pride of the booming city of Pittsburgh. Steel City takes you to another time and another world that is distant but familiar.

William J. Miller, Jr. grew up in Pittsburgh and was always fascinated by the living connections to its storied past: the Carnegie Library and Museum, the Carnegie Institute of Technology, and, in his own neighborhood, the Frick mansion, where Henry Frick’s daughter, Helen, still lived. Mr. Miller spent his entire career in journalistic enterprises as reporter, publisher, blogger, and Time Inc. consumer marketing veteran. He graduated from the Hotchkiss School and Trinity College, Hartford, CT and lives in Watch Hill, RI and Greensboro, NC with his wife, Warren, and Havanese, Jake. This is his first novel.

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