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PORTSIDE CULTURE

PHILLIP BONOSKY’S FIGHT FOR THE WORKING CLASS  
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Richard Gazarik
December 9, 2025
Pittsburgh Review of Books
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_ Born in the Mon Valley, Bonosky transformed from a devout Catholic
into a committed Communist writer, chronicling the struggles of
working-class immigrants. _

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Burning ValleyPhilip BonoskyMasses & Mainstream First Edition,
1953OCLC: 37315232

_The Magic Fern _Philip BonoskyInternational PublishersFirst Edition,
1961OCLC: 4021544 

Phillip Bonosky wanted to be a Catholic priest growing up during the
Great Depression amid the slag heaps of a nearby steel mill in
Duquesne, a gritty steel town 12 miles southeast of Pittsburgh in the
Monongahela Valley, but instead, he became an internationally known
socialist writer whose work went unpublished by mainstream publishing
houses in the United States for one reason — Bonosky was a
communist.

His novel, _Burning Valley_, remained unpublished in the United States
until 1998 when the University of Illinois Press reprinted the work as
part of its series “The Radical Left Reconsidered.” Bonosky filled
a literary void because few authors at the time were writing about the
labor movement and the issues facing the working man. The working
class lacked heroes but Bonosky found his heroes in the workers
themselves who struggled to form unions in the face of strong
opposition by steel companies.

When the novel was originally published, it was criticized as
“anti-Catholic propaganda” and an attempt “to ridicule Chrisian
teachings.” When it was reissued, one reviewer wrote _Burning
Valley_ was a “thoughtful” tale about conflict between poor
workers and the Catholic Church. It also told a story about the
struggle of eastern European immigrants and African Americans to stop
a steel company from evicting residents in an industrial town so it
could increase production by expanding the mill.

The book is a coming-of-age novel about an altar boy, Benedict
Bulmanis, a devout Catholic from a working-class Lithuanian family who
turns from Catholicism to Communism after his church refuses to stand
up for the steel workers who are fighting to form a union. Bulmanis no
longer felt the deep spiritual feeling, the odor of burning incense
and candle wax, the smell of wilting flowers on the altar or the
peaceful serenity that made his skin tingle when he entered a church.
He tasted the acrid smell of sulfur in the air spewing from the
Duquesne Works, where his father worked for forty years, twelve hours
a day, six days a week while raising eight children. 

He saw the hardship the families of steel workers were forced to live
with.  The memories provided the realism he needed. He believed the
church was supposed to side with workers, but Catholicism was the
avowed enemy of Communism and provided workers with a false hope for
social justice so he rejected his faith.

While he may have been an unknown literary figure in America, _Burning
Valley_ was a bestseller in socialist countries. Bonosky found the
recognition in eastern Europe that he was denied in America. Soviet
publishers printed 100,000 copies of his book which would have been a
bestseller in the U.S and would have topped the best seller list at
The New York Times. Other socialist countries followed suit. Editions
published in China, Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany. When he
passed through customs in East Germany, an officer looked at the name
on his passport and at once recognized him.

 “Bonosky, didn’t you write _Burning Valley_?” The officer had
read it in German, and there was a big discussion in the German press
about it. So, there was a literary life that existed for me, but not
here in America. I am still unknown here,” said Bonosky. Communist
publishing houses embraced the novel because its theme was
ideologically sympathetic to workers and critical of capitalism. At
the same time his work  gave readers an insight into the thinking of
American blue-collar workers and their struggle for a better life.

“What, in sum, was it like to be a Marxist in the HUAC years? You
were living in this reality . . . the rawness of the struggle was
debilitating. You were in the midst of a trauma,” he said. The House
Un-American Activities Committee subpoenaed suspected communists
interrogating them whether they were, or ever had been, members of the
Communist Party. If they admitted under oath that they were once
communists, congressmen demanded they name names of others in the
party.   

The late 1940s and early 1950s was not a good time to be a communist
in Pittsburgh. They faced political isolation and were ostracized and
watched by the government. Some party members were tried for sedition
or faced deportation if they were not American citizens.

The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was
beginning to heat up. The Korean War began in 1950 when North Korea
invaded the south sending American troops reeling. Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg were executed in 1953 for espionage on behalf of the Soviet
Union, the same year _Burning Valley_ was published.      

McCarthyism sent liberals and progressives running for cover.
Americans in the 1950s feared a social revolution and conformity
created a “black silence of fear.” Pittsburgh became the
“violent epicenter” of McCarthyism and was known as the “Mecca
of the Inquisition” for its heavy-handed treatment of communists,
Progressives, liberals and the foreign-born who faced the wrath of
anti-communist zealots and the threats of prosecution for sedition or
deportation. Bonosky was caught up in that ideological storm when he
was fired from his job at Duquesne Steel for trying to form a union
and came under scrutiny of the FBI and the House Un-American
Activities Committee.

Thomas Bell brought the plight of workers to the forefront when he
wrote _Out Of This Furnace_ in 1941, a generational tale of three
Slovak families in America, by portraying the brutal working
conditions immigrant steel workers faced. Bell, whose real name was
Adalbert Thomas Belejcak, grew up in Braddock and, like Bonosky, used
his ethnic heritage to add realism to his story. He was not a
communist, but Bell joined the Civil Rights Congress and League of
American Writers, both Communist Party front groups. Like _Burning
Valley_,_ Out _Of _ This Furnace _was out of print until
Carnegie-Mellon University English Professor David Demarest persuaded
the University of Pittsburgh Press to reissue it in 1976.

 

 

Bonosky’s literary career began at the age of five after receiving a
library card from the local branch of the Carnegie Library. He wrote
his first poem at ten years old on butcher’s paper. After graduating
from high school, he wanted to attend college but was rejected by
every school where he applied. Bonosky’s first piece of professional
writing appeared in Collier’s magazine. He also published short
stories in the Communist Party publication, The New Masses. His proud
mother told her son that she “wanted him to write for her, for the
immigrants, for the people who could often neither write nor read,”
wrote Norman Markowitz in Public Affairs.

Bonosky’s career as a journalist took him from Duquesne to China,
Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan and Moscow. He was one of the first
reporters to enter China after Mao’s rise to power. He interviewed
Ho Chi Minh in 1960 and saw the downfall of the despotic Pol Pot and
the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in 1980. He reported from Afghanistan
before the rise of the Taliban and served as the Moscow correspondent
for the Daily World, the party’s newspaper.

He continued to write books. _The Magic Fern_ refers to a Lithuanian
fairy tale that claims a magical fern has the power to make wishes
come true  but only for others. Leo, the book’s main character,
wishes for socialism in America but he knows he can’t achieve any
justice for others if he just wishes it for himself.  _Brother Bill
McKie: Building the Union at Ford_, is a biography of a Communist
Party organizer who helped found the United Auto Workers at Ford’s
River Rouge plant. Published in 1953, Bonosky tells the story of
McKie, a pivotal figure in union organizing attempts in the face of
violent corporate opposition. _Dragon Pink on Old White,_ published in
1963,  is a travelogue about his trip through China before Mao’s
revolution.

 In _A Bird in Her Hair and Other Stories_, a collection of short
stories, published in 1967, Bonosky returns to a familiar theme, the
working-class struggle against capitalism and racism. _Beyond the
Border of Myth_, _From Vilnius to Hanoi_, came out in 1967. Bonosky
recounts his travels from Lithuania to North Vietnam. After visiting
Afghanistan, he wrote _Afghanistan – Washington’s Secret War,
_about the rise of the Taliban. _Devils in Amber_:_The Baltics_ came
out in 1992. The work recounts the mixture of folk tradition and pagan
rituals in the Baltics.

Workers in Duquesne lived in Oliver Hollow but the steel mill filled
the valley with slag from the mill’s furnaces, hauling the debris on
trains, then dumping the heaps down the hillside like rolling balls of
flame to build a foundation for enlarging the mill. The burning slag
forced some residents to scatter after the fire ignited several homes.

Bonosky was born Felix Baranauskas in Duquesne in 1916, the fourth of
eight children to religious Lithuanian immigrants who lived in Oliver
Hollow, a patch that extended from ‘Polish Hill’ in Duquesne to
the railroad tracks underneath the Thompson Run Bridge to the
Monongahela River. Bonosky refers to the location as “Hunky
Hollow” in the book. His parents, Jonas and Barbara Maciulute
Baranauskas, emigrated from Dzukija, a poor, heavily forested region
in southeastern Lithuania.

Duquesne was an inhospitable place for immigrants who were confined to
the most run-down part of the city in places with derogatory names
like ‘Hunky Hill’ or ‘Hunky Town.’ Workers’ families kept
their distance from native-born Americans who worked in management at
the mills or who held the better paying jobs that were out of reach to
immigrants. Workers lived in ubiquitous company-built shacks that were
indistinguishable from one another. Children of steel company
officials would stand on the ridges above the hollow and taunt the
children of workers with ethnic slurs. “ We eat cake, they eat
slop.”

Bonosky graduated from high school in 1932 but the early years of the
Great Depression shattered his dreams of college. There was absolutely
nothing for me,” he wrote. “So, I had to leave. I left home.
Goodbye.” Bonosky hopped on a freight train and landed in
Washington, D.C. where he lived in a warehouse run by the Transient
Bureau.

Bonosky met Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1959 in Moscow at the
Third Writers Conference of Writers of the Soviet Union in which
Bonosky praised the Soviet leader. The mention didn’t escape the
committee’s notice, which quoted Bonosky in a report.

“We stood beneath the insignia of the Czars, military victories
emblazoned on the walls around us and I said to Khrushchev that the
greatest proof to me that workers really owned and ran this country
was our standing here in the Kremlin – an ex-steelworker and an
ex-miner- and drinking a toast together. Khrushchev agreed and quoted
from the Internationale: “we have been naught; we shall be all,”
noted in the committee’s report.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Bonosky remained a communist in
name only, believing the party had abandoned revolutionary theory by
embracing “Browderism.” Bonosky continued to write until his death
even though he lost his ability to see because of macular
degeneration. At 92, he was working on his autobiography and a novel,
_Benedict_, a sequel to _Burning Valley_. Bonosky died in 2013 in New
York City at the age of 96 but the death of this ‘proletarian
writer’ from the Monongahela Valley went unnoticed in Pittsburgh
news outlets and barely rated mention in the national media. _The New
York Times _published Bonosky’s obituary but his death was shrouded
in anonymity.

 

About the Author

Richard Gazarik is journalist and author. He has won awards for his
writing and investigative reporting into public and corporate
corruption in Pennsylvania. He is the author of Black Valley: The Life
and Death of Fannie Sellins, Prohibition Pittsburgh and Wicked
Pittsburgh, the latter both published by The History Press, and the
biography The Mayor of Shantytown: The Life of Father James Renshaw
Cox.

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