Most people remember John Knowles as the author of A Separate Peace, a brief, enormously popular novel which searchingly studied the lives of two boys on the brink of adulthood. The writing was low-keyed, but it seemed to capture perfectly the quicksilver mental atmosphere of that stage of adolescence. In A Vein of Riches, Knowles turns to a different subject—the expansion and collapse of the "King Coal" industry in West Virginia from 1909 to 1924—and to a new genre—a Dreiserian chronicle of people and power. He seems very knowledgeable about the subject and rather uncomfortable with the form….
[The southern coal industry is portrayed] through the adventures of the Catherwood family, one of the small dynastic groups at the pinnacle of this terribly American boom society, and they are, unfortunately, transparent devices….
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