Steel City: A Story of Pittsburgh

Steel City is the story of a young man exposed to the turbulent world of 1890’s Pittsburgh who confronts many of the same issues that we grapple with today: immigration, tariffs, unionism and income inequality. It has similarities in content and style to Lauren Belfer’s novel, City of Light, and Roxana Robinson’s fictionalized family history, Dawson’s Fall. Like Mark Sullivan’s Beneath the Scarlet Sky and Graham Moore’s Last Days of Night, this historical novel depicts individuals navigating the great events of their day.

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 with his wife, Warren, and Havanese, Jake. This is his first novel.