By Henry Kraus

Four years after his death, and more than sixty years after writing this personal history, Henry Kraus' The Acquisition of Courage is finally seeing print.

For years, Kraus kept his manuscript locked in a vault in Paris, along with other memories of his passage from working-class childhood to student of the arts to advocate for the poor and jobless. Shortly before he died, Kraus decided to publish the work, and his wife Dorothy carried out his wish.

During those years, Kraus worked as an organizer for the fledgling UAW in Cleveland, then became the first editor of the United Automobile Worker and the Flint Auto Worker.

Kraus' first-hand coverage of the 1936-37 sit-down strike became the basis for the labor classic, The Many and the Few. Later, Kraus and his wife, Dorothy, moved to California, where he helped organize aircraft workers and where he wrote In the City Was a Garden, the story of their life in an integrated housing project.

During the McCarthy years, the Krauses left the U.S. for Paris, where they rekindled their interest in medieval art, focusing particularly on misericords, depictions of the day-to-day lives of ordinary people carved by artisans on choir stalls, and on the financing of the great cathedrals of Europe. Four books on these subjects resulted in a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, which enabled Kraus to do additional work.

The Acquisition of Courage is a lively recollection of the life of a young man in Europe and America during the Great Depression -- years in which Kraus became not just an observer of, but an activist in the movement for workers' rights and social justice.

Other books by Henry Kraus: The Many and the Few, In the City Was a Garden, The Living Theater of Medieval Art, Gold Was the Mortar: Economics of Cathedral Building, The Hidden World of Misericords, Gothic Choir Stalls of Spain, Heroes of Unwritten Story: the UAW, 1934-39, Misericords Unveiled: Hidden Carvings in Sacred Places (forthcoming).

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Hardcover, 271 pages, illustrated

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P.O. Box 14097
Detroit, MI 48214

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THE ACQUISITION OF COURAGE

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