Hawk's Nest is a novel written by West Virginia author Hubert Skidmore, published in 1941.
A fictionalized account of one of America's greatest industrial disasters, it is an account of the Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster in which hundreds or thousands of men were sickened and died as a result of silicosis they contracted while digging the tunnel under unsafe conditions.
One of Skidmore's characters, a dying teenager, begs doctors to perform an autopsy on his body so that the cause of his illness can be discovered and so that other workers might be saved.
Hawk's Nest was republished in 2004 by the University of Tennessee Press and has gained some small amount of popularity since reappearing.
An often repeated story claims that the book's first edition was pulled from many shelves due to pressure from Union Carbide Co.,[3] the company responsible for the countless deaths recounted in the novel.