Franklin Rosemont

Franklin Rosemont was born in Chicago in 1943. His father, Henry, was a labor activist, and his mother, Sally, a jazz musician. He edited and wrote an introduction for What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings by André Breton, and edited Rebel Worker, Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion, The Rise and Fall of the Dill Pickle, and Juice Is Stranger than Friction: Selected Writings of T-Bone Slim. With Penelope Rosemont and Paul Garon he edited The Forecast Is Hot! His work was deeply concerned with both the history of surrealism (writing a foreword for Max Ernst and Alchemy: A Magician in Search of Myth) and of the radical labor movement in America. For several decades he and Penelope Rosemont combined such interests helming the venerable radical publishing house the Charles H. Kerr Co. He died in 2009 in Chicago.

• Book events
• Reviews
• More about Franklin

---

Praise

“This engaging anthology features the lyrics to 250 or so Wobbly songs, rich with references to job sharks, shovel stiffs, capitalist tools, and plutocratic parasites. Wobbly wordsmiths such as the fabled Joe Hill, T-Bone Slim, Haywire Mac, and Richard Brazier set their fighting words to popular tunes of the day, gospel hymns, old ballads and patriotic anthems.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“This collection, the last major work both of the late ‘laborlorist’ Archie Green and of the late surrealist poet and labor publisher Franklin Rosemont, should be of great value to folklorists, activists, and singers alike.”
—Journal of American Folklore

“In The Big Red Songbook, the editors have thoughtfully documented twentieth-century Wobbly song in all of its foot-stompin’ glory.”
—International Labor and Working-Class History

---

Praise

“Joe Hill has finally found a chronicler worthy of his revolutionary spirit, sense of humor, and poetic imagination.”
—Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams

“Rosemont’s treatment of Joe Hill is passionate, polemical, and downright entertaining. What he gives us is an extended and detailed argument for considering both Hill and the IWW for their contributions toward creating an autonomous and uncompromising alternative culture.”
—Gordon Simmons, Labor Studies Journal

“Magnificent, practical, irreverent and (as one might say) magisterial, written in a direct, passionate, sometimes funny, deeply searching style.”
—Peter Linebaugh, author of Stop, Thief!

“Rosemont seems to have hunted down every available detail of Hill’s short life and abiding legend.”
—Los Angeles Times

“It has been a long time since so much new material on Joe Hill and the Wobblies has been collected in one volume. All students of the IWW, labor cartoons and songs, radical humor, and the history of blue-collar countercultures in the U.S. will find this book indispensable.”
—Salvatore Salerno, editor of The Big Red Songbook

---

---

Book Events

---

Reviews

• Joe Hill: An Interview with Tamara L. Smith
• Rebel Voices in Free Voices
• The Protest Songs That Drove the Wobblies a Century Ago Are Still Lighting Fires
• Joe Hill Again!
• Rebel Voices reviewed in Labor Studies Journal
• Staughton Lynd reviews Rebel Voices

---

Interviews

---

Mentions

---

Blog