author
Jonathan Thayer Lincoln
1869–1942
A mill owner’s son who wrote with unusual sympathy about factory life, labor, and the human cost of industrial change. His best-known books bring early 20th-century New England mills and workers into sharp, readable focus.
1 Audiobook
The factory
by Jonathan Thayer Lincoln
About the author
Born in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1869, Jonathan Thayer Lincoln was educated at Dartmouth and Harvard and remained closely connected to the textile world of New England. Archival and bibliographic sources describe him as associated with his family’s business in Fall River, while also taking a serious interest in labor questions and the changing relationship between workers and industry.
That perspective shaped his writing. The City of the Dinner-Pail (1909) grew out of pieces first published in The Atlantic Monthly and Outlook, and it examines industrial life, working people, and class tensions in a mill city. His later book The Factory (1912) was based on lectures given in connection with Dartmouth’s Amos Tuck School and explored the rise of the factory system and its social effects.
Lincoln also appears in accounts of the Boston literary circle known as the Visionists, suggesting that he moved in creative as well as industrial and academic worlds. He died in 1942, leaving behind work that stands out for trying to understand labor and management not as abstractions, but as people living through the pressures of modern industry.