"Progress" is a continuously operating process, one that occurs without us even recognizing it, that is until we become one of its victims. Progress claims its victims and creates its winners and losers while the people who are destroyed by it are forgotten. In his 1941 novel Out of this Furnace, Thomas Bell brings us one step closer to understanding the lives that were sacrificed in the name of progress. It is a story of immigrants …showed first 75 words of 1957 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1957 total…and the technology that we have been focusing on must literally consume raw materials like coke and ore to operate and in the end produces a product. Bell’s characters are consumed like raw materials and this process changes them. When Dobie states that he is "Made in the USA"(410) he is right, he is a product of society. This society, based on technology and progress, consumes and produces a society unaware of its effects.