Tom Grogan

Tom Grogan is a stevedore contractor on the Staten Island waterfront, hires and fires, faces down the union and the local bosses — and is a woman, running her dead husband's business under his name because no one would give a contract to a widow. Smith built the foundation of the Statue of Liberty and painted watercolors for major museums; this 1896 novel was drawn from a woman he had watched do it. Fifty-six plates of harbour and waterfront painting by artists including Edvard Munch and George Bellows carry the working life of the port through the years of Tom Grogan.