# The Strike *A Biography of Larry Itliong* — Legendary Biographies No. 099 - **Subject:** Larry Dulay Itliong - **Written by:** Solomon Treadway - **Shelf:** Movements / Civil Rights - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 198 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 198 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-096-6) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Rowan Hale (ISBN 979-8-90623-166-6) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/099-the-strike.html ## About this book September 8, 1965. Two thousand Filipino farmworkers walk off the table-grape fields of Delano, California, refusing to pick at the prevailing rate. The strike committee is led by a fifty-one-year-old organiser named Larry Dulay Itliong. A week later he writes to Cesar Chavez of the National Farm Workers Association, proposing that the two unions strike together. The result is the United Farm Workers — and a five-year strike and consumer-boycott campaign that ends in the historic 1970 grape contracts. Solomon Treadway's biography opens earlier — in San Nicolas, Pangasinan, where Itliong was born in 1913, and where he arrived in Seattle in 1929 as a fifteen-year-old to work the salmon canneries of Alaska — and follows the arc through the lettuce fields, the canneries, the AFL-CIO Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, the Delano grape strike, the 1965-1970 boycott, the 1971 resignation from the UFW board over the marginalisation of the manong generation, and the colon cancer that killed him in 1977 at age sixty-three. What emerges is a portrait of a Filipino-American labour organiser whose name the American labour movement is only now, fifty years after his death, finishing the work of recovering. ## Contents 1. The Province 2. The Crossing 3. The Manongs 4. The Apprenticeship 5. Delano 6. September Eighth 7. The Picket Lines 8. The Boycott 9. The Merger 10. The Body 11. The Growers 12. Chavez 13. The Village 14. The Resignation 15. The Law 16. February Eighth 17. The Reclamation 18. The Structure ## Questions **Who is The Strike about?** Larry Dulay Itliong. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Strike — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,291 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 60,500 words, 18 chapters, 198 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Solomon Treadway is a Chicago-born culture critic whose biographies focus on Black American writers, intellectuals, and the post-war public sphere. His research utilizes deep archival investigations to reconstruct the social circles, political struggles, and literary debates that shaped mid-century American thought. In works like The Chairman, Passing the Torch, and The Papers, Treadway traces how ideas move from private correspondence into the broader cultural consciousness. His writing emphasizes the everyday realities and collaborative networks behind major intellectual shifts, avoiding dry academic jargon in favor of clear, character-driven narrative history. He lives in Chicago, Illinois, where he works as an independent researcher and spends his weekends volunteering at local community archives and bookshops.