Volume 26, Number 2 · February 22, 1979
The Pessimist
By Murray Kempton
The Hoffa Wars: Teamsters, Rebels, Politicians, and the Mob
by Dan E. Moldea
Paddington Press, 450 pp., $10.95
The Teamsters
by Steven Brill
Simon and Schuster, 414 pp., $11.95
The space allotted to the American teamster in the landscape of our literature is pretty much its desert portion. The only two figures with much claim upon our memory are Tennessee Williams's Stanley Kowalski and William Faulkner's Montgomery Ward Snopes, who was drummed out of Jefferson, Mississippi, for dealing in filthy pictures and thereafter noticed only in dim exile as a Teamster business agent in Memphis. The truck driver as a wound to the feelings of radical feminism, his business agent as a Snopes: such is the extent of what the higher literary sensibility has had to tell us about both. We can hardly say that art has been unjust, but we cannot help feeling that it has been incomplete.
Review, 5368 words
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