When the novel was originally published, it was criticized as “anti-Catholic propaganda” and an attempt “to ridicule Christian teachings.” When it was reissued, one reviewer wrote Burning Valley was a “thoughtful” tale about conflict between poor workers and the Catholic Church. It also told a story about the struggle of eastern European immigrants and African Americans to stop a steel company from evicting residents in an industrial town so it could increase production by expanding the mill.
The book is a coming-of-age novel about an altar boy, Benedict Bulmanis, a devout Catholic from a working-class Lithuanian family who turns from Catholicism to Communism after his church refuses to stand up for the steel workers who are fighting to form a union. Bulmanis no longer felt the deep spiritual feeling, the odor of burning incense and candle wax, the smell of wilting flowers on the altar or the peaceful serenity that made his skin tingle when he entered a church. He tasted the acrid smell of sulfur in the air spewing from the Duquesne Works, where his father worked for forty years, twelve hours a day, six days a week while raising eight children.
He saw the hardship the families of steel workers were forced to live with. The memories provided the realism he needed. He believed the church was supposed to side with workers, but Catholicism was the avowed enemy of Communism and provided workers with a false hope for social justice so he rejected his faith.
While he may have been an unknown literary figure in America, Burning Valley was a bestseller in socialist countries. Bonosky found the recognition in eastern Europe that he was denied in America. Soviet publishers printed 100,000 copies of his book which would have been a bestseller in the U.S and would have topped the best seller list at The New York Times. Other socialist countries followed suit. Editions published in China, Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany. When he passed through customs in East Germany, an officer looked at the name on his passport and at once recognized him.
“Bonosky, didn’t you write Burning Valley?” The officer had read it in German, and there was a big discussion in the German press about it. So, there was a literary life that existed for me, but not here in America. I am still unknown here,” said Bonosky. Communist publishing houses embraced the novel because its theme was ideologically sympathetic to workers and critical of capitalism. At the same time his work gave readers an insight into the thinking of American blue-collar workers and their struggle for a better life.