Mine Seed by the poet and novelist Lucia Dailey, is a self-published work of historical fiction, published in 2002, and set in the anthracite mining region of Pennsylvania during the turbulent era of labor struggles and industrialization from the 1840s, through the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 to the Great Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902.
Written as literary fiction but based on historical events as seen from the workers' viewpoint, it depicts the often bloody struggle by mine unions to gain rights and fair pay—culminating in 1902, when the coal strike was resolved by arbitration. Historian Howard Zinn called Mine Seed "something extraordinary in literature." Although written as literature, it includes a bibliography, historical notes, and oral histories reaching back to the 1840s.
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