http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Coal
King Coal is a book by Upton Sinclair, first published in 1917, that exposes the dirty working conditions in the coal mining industry in the western United States during the 1910's. Similar to an earlier work, The Jungle, Sinclair expresses his socialist viewpoints from the perspective of a single protagonist, Hal Warner, caught up in the schemes and plots of the oppressive American capitalist system. The book itself is based off of the 1914-1915 Colorado coal strikes.