American novelist Winston Churchill (who bore no known relation to the British statesman of the same name) was regarded as a master of realist literature, and his novels paint a remarkably vivid picture of the daily lives of both the haves and the have-nots in the early-twentieth-century United States. The Dwelling-Place of Light focuses on a bitter struggle between mill workers and factory owners in a Massachusetts town—and the unforeseeable consequences that arise from the ugly clash.