John Hoerr is a writer and historian who has written extensively about labor, industry and politics.

His best known work, And the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline of the American Steel Industry, is a contemporary labor history focusing on labor-management relations preceding and during steel’s collapse in the 1980s.

More recently, in Harry, Tom and Father Rice: Accusation and Betrayal in America’s Cold War, Hoerr examines the lives of a congressman (his uncle), a union leader, and a priest who become entangled in an ugly red-baiting episode during McCarthy Era purges in Pittsburgh.

With these two books, wrote a reviewer in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Hoerr “has become a leading chronicler of the demise of industrial America” (Bob Hoover, “How Three Lives Clashed at Crossroads of Labor and Politics,” August 21, 2005).