A factory woman in a Russian mill town watches her son become a revolutionary and, after he is taken, takes up the work herself. Gorky wrote it in America in 1906 while raising money for the movement; Lenin called it a very timely book, and it became the model for a whole official literature that followed. Sixty plates by painters including Nikolay Kasatkin and Boris Kustodiev follow the same road from poverty and hard labor to the first stirrings of revolt.