author
W. F. Burns
Best known for a firsthand account of the 1894 Pullman Strike, this little-documented writer brought a railroad worker’s perspective to one of the most famous labor conflicts in American history. His surviving work feels direct, personal, and closely tied to the struggles of working people.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Very little biographical information about this author could be confirmed from reliable public sources. What is clear is that W. F. Burns wrote The Pullman Boycott: A Complete History of the Great R. R. Strike, first published in 1894, a book centered on the Pullman Strike and boycott that helped define the American labor movement.
In the introduction to that book, Burns says this was his first effort as a writer and explains that his work since boyhood had been mainly in railway service, specifically as a switchman. That gives his account a distinctly insider point of view: he was not writing as a distant historian, but as someone who saw the conflict through the life of railroad labor.
Because so little else is firmly documented, Burns remains a somewhat shadowy figure today. Even so, his book has lasted as a primary-era account of the strike, valued for its immediacy and for the way it captures the anger, pressure, and political stakes surrounding labor unrest in the 1890s.