The search for Louis Tikas is a search for a shadow, an almost-vanished memory. Like a hound on a cold scent, Papanikolas…sniffs out labor contractors, militiamen, company detectives, union leaders, politicians, Old World relatives, and childhood companions. Little by little he fills in the jigsaw mosaic that is the history of Greek immigrants in the American West…This is a poet at work; the book he has produced is at once a cultural history, an elegy, and a lyrical autobiography…The story is a little Iliad from the losers’ side. –Wallace Stegner, in his foreword.
Papanikolas brings to Buried Unsung a gift for moving prose and an intimate understanding of those Greek cultural values that affected the Ludlow strikers…At every step, the author merges the written record with oral material and his personal experiences to give unbelievable power to the tale. –American Historical Review.
[A] stunning book, one of the most exciting I have read in a decade…The mystery and drama of [Papanikola’s] journey to resurrect Tikas and discover his own soul still haunt me weeks after I finished reading the book. –Harry Mark Petrakis, Chicago Tribune.Louis Tikas was a union organizer killed in the battle between striking coal miners and state militia in Ludlow, Colorado, in 1914. In Buried Unsung he stands for a whole generation of immigrant workers who, in the years before World War I, found themselves caught between the realities of industrial America and their aspirations for a better life. Zeese Papanikolas, who lives in California, is the author, with Frank Bergon, of Looking Far West: The Search for the American West in History, Myth and Literature (1978).