author
Charles Sheldon French
A little-known American writer whose surviving work ranges from poetry to sharp social fiction, with a strong interest in the lives and struggles of ordinary workers. His best-known book, The Worship of the Golden Calf, turns labor conflict in Massachusetts into a vivid, story-driven critique of industrial life.
1 Audiobook
The worship of the golden calf: A story of wage-slavery in Massachusetts
by Charles Sheldon French
About the author
Charles Sheldon French appears to have been an American author active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The clearest confirmed works tied to him are Sugar Maple and Other Poems and The Worship of the Golden Calf: A Story of Wage-Slavery in Massachusetts, showing a writer who moved between verse and socially minded fiction.
The Worship of the Golden Calf is the book most often preserved and reprinted today. Its focus on wage labor and factory conditions suggests a strong concern with inequality, working life, and the human cost of industry.
Very little biographical information about French is easy to confirm from major reference sources, which makes him one of those authors known more through the survival of his books than through a well-documented life story. Even so, the work that remains gives a clear sense of a writer drawn to moral questions and the pressures of modern economic life.