In April 1952, Harper’s Magazine published “The Pirates’ Nest of New York,” a report on the aftermath of a wildcat strike on the city’s docks. The piece begins with a longshoreman and two activist priests conducting a friendly argument about exactly how a port reformer of an earlier era had been murdered. Was he shot, garroted, or immersed in fresh concrete? The article moves with an easy authority, sustaining its momentum by shifting between narrative and analysis every several paragraphs. By the end of its roughly ten thousand words, the reader knows why (and to what extent) longshoremen’s wages were lower in New York than on the West Coast; which Manhattan piers were under the sway of “the pistol local,” also known as “the superhomicidal local”; and how the shipping companies themselves were complicit in the mob corruption that had crippled the longshoremen’s unions.

Was this the work of an upstart writer inspired by the reportage of Edmund Wilson’s early Depression-era dispatches, The American Jitters? No, the energy that drove the creation of “Pirates’ Nest” was not the energy of a young reporter on the make. Its author was Mary Heaton Vorse, a seventy-seven-year-old who had been writing about labor for Harper’s (and many other outlets) since 1912.

Vorse was never a household name, but in her long career she witnessed an astonishing range of events. She interviewed Belgian refugees in the Netherlands during World War I, and then was detained at the German-Swiss border on suspicion of espionage; she was present at the creation of the Provincetown Players, who initially performed on a converted pier that she owned; she barnstormed for women’s suffrage in 1915; she organized textile workers in Pennsylvania in 1920; she visited Berlin during the grim summer of 1933, and wrote a dispatch for...

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