The mythology surrounding Frank Harris frequently overshadows his worth as a writer and raconteur. Well-traveled, friend to Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, acquainted with practically everyone else and blessed (or cursed, depending onhow one looks at it. Harris himself was never quite clear on the subject) with numerous love affairs, Harris's literary output is often the last thing anyone remembers about him.
"The Bomb," his brilliant novel of labor unrest and anarchist violence set in Chicago in the 1870s, follows a dark period in America when the bosses ruled with the iron fist of the police force and took what little they got ... or else. Following an emigrant worker who falls in with labor agitators, and who may be a double agent for the police, the novel recounts the events leading up to and the aftermath of the Haymarket Riots when a bomb was thrown and a nascent labor movement crushed brutally.
"The Bomb" is right up there with Jack London's "The Iron Heel" as a book that desperately needs to be re-read today.