The New York Times praised Communist Party reporter John L. Spivak�s shocking 1932 novel Georgia Nigger as having �the weight and authority of a sociological investigation.� This Southern Classics edition makes Spivak�s narrative available to modern readers, augmented with a new introduction by David A. Davis as well as additional documents Spivak gathered during his investigation into the abuses of the Depression-era Southern prison system. Georgia Nigger exposes the institutionalized system of sharecropping, debt peonage, and exorbitant chain gang sentences that trapped many southern black men in a cycle of labor exploitation. Spivak (1897�1981) gained unlikely access to chain gangs through the Georgia Prison Commission, and his book combines elements of muckraking reportage and proletarian fiction to offer a sensational and damning case for prison reform. The plot follows David Jackson, the son of black sharecroppers, who is released from a chain gang then almost immediately re-arrested and bound over to a white planter as a peon. Jackson escapes peonage only to be arrested again as a vagrant and sentenced to another chain gang. He tries to escape again with the help of an older inmate, but they are both captured and suffer torturous punishments. Spivak�s novel has merit both as revealing historical account of sharecropping and chain gangs and as a compelling literary allegory of an individual confronted by sweeping social forces. For Depression-era readers, Georgia Nigger provided outrage beyond its obvious depictions of inhumanity and torture. The book hinges on the crime of vagrancy, a charge often used to force into labor persons without obvious means of income. In this particular arrangement, being unemployed was a crime in itself, which allowed for the exploitation of the economically vulnerable. Like many writers and intellectuals of his era, Spivak sought to expose the abuses committed against the nation�s most impoverished. His book combines elements of labor rabble-rousing, radical fiction, and documentary photography to depict the lives of black Southerners and to indict a flawed system of labor and justice.