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(Correction appended April 2.)

A well-known journalist, labor historian and city native will publish his first novel this summer.

John Hoerr's new book, Monongahela Dusk, is set in McKeesport during the Depression and World War II.

A 1948 graduate of McKeesport High School and a Penn State alumnus, Hoerr is a former writer and editor for Business Week and producer at WQED-TV who covered labor issues in coal, steel, auto-making and other industries for four decades.

Hoerr's 1988 chronicle of basic steel's decline, And the Wolf Finally Came, has become a standard reference for labor and industrial historians.

His other non-fiction books include 1997's We Can't Eat Prestige, which describes the 1970s effort by a group of mostly female employees to organize the staff of Harvard University; and 2005's Harry, Tom, and Father Rice, an account of the sometimes scurrilous efforts to expel suspected Communists from the union representing Westinghouse Electric employees in the 1950s.

Hoerr currently resides in Teaneck, N.J.

. . .

Monongahela Dusk will be published by Pittsburgh-based Autumn House Press, a non-profit whose other authors include Samuel Hazo, a distinguished poet and professor at Duquesne University; Ed Ochester, general editor of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize at Pitt; Gerald Stern, whose work has won a Guggenheim fellowship and a National Book Award; and the late Patricia Dobler, director of the Women's Creative Writing Center at Carlow College.

A friend, Chatham University writing professor Peter Oresick, took Monongahela Dusk to Autumn House, Hoerr says.

. . .

According to Hoerr, Monongahela Dusk is set amid the struggles of the Steel Workers' Organizing Committee and the United Steelworkers of America to organize the industry.

The novel is the story of a traveling beer salesman, Pete Bonner, who picks up hitchhiker Joe Miravich, a blacklisted coal miner.

When the men overhear a plot to kill a prominent labor leader, they themselves become targets of racketeers and a shadowy industrialist who ordered the assassination.

The two escape harm but wind up taking divergent paths in McKeesport for the next decade --- Bonner becomes a wealthy businessman, while Miravich becomes president of a USW local.

. . .

Hoerr says he's been writing unpublished fiction for years.

"It's not a case of turning to fiction at the end of a reportorial career," he says. "This novel had been in the making for a long time."

But despite his past publishing track record, Monongahela Dusk almost didn't see the light of day. Hoerr was unable to attract attention from literary agents.

For a while, he says, he thought that publishers just weren't interested in stories set in the "Rust Belt." With the recent release of Philipp Meyer's American Rust, a crime novel set in a fictional Pennsylvania mill town, Hoerr says he now has his doubts.

"Maybe none of them could pronounce my name correctly," he quips.

Correction, Not Perfection: The title of Hoerr's novel was incorrect in an earlier posting. (In fact, it was the exact opposite of what the title should have been.) My apologies.

I will now try to tell my dusk from my dawn, right after I learn to tell a hole in the ground from the other place.