Thomas Bell

Thomas Bell was born Adalbert Thomas Belejcak in Braddock, Pennsylvania, in 1903. He was the son of Michael and Mary Belejcak, ethnic Slavs who immigrated to Braddock from the Sarisa province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Bell started work in the steel mill at age fifteen, first as an apprentice electrician. He also began writing as a teenager, and by his early twenties, he wrote for the Braddock News-Herald. Bell moved to New York in 1922, where he continued writing. In 1930, he published his first novel, The Breed of Basil. His second novel, All Brides are Beautiful, a romance story set in New York in the years before World War II, was published in 1936. Out of This Furnace, published in 1941 and re-issued by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1976, is his most well-known work. Bell based many of the characters on his own family’s experiences as immigrant Slovak steelworkers in Braddock. His grandfather was an alcoholic, and his grandmother committed suicide. Bell’s father, Michael, started in Braddock as a steelworker before transitioning to retail work, but he died from tuberculosis at a young age. Bell’s mother, Mary, succumbed to the same disease five years later. Of his three uncles who emigrated to Braddock, only one, Joseph, survived to old age. A fellow steelworker likely murdered Bell’s uncle Paul, and poison gas from a furnace killed his uncle John at age thirty-two. Bell died from cancer in 1961, and an autobiographic memoir, In the Midst of Life, appeared that same year.