Made in U.S.A. is a novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 by the American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 writer Alfred Kern

Alfred Kern

Alfred Kern was an American novelist and professor.He served as the Frederick F. Seely Professor of English at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania, from the 1950s until his retirement in the mid-1980s....

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The story is set in the 1960s in Braden, Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...

, a fictional mill town north of Pittsburgh. Protagonist Steve Hamner is a successful trade unionist for the fictional United Ore and Metal Workers, AFL-CIO

AFL-CIO

The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, commonly AFL–CIO, is a national trade union center, the largest federation of unions in the United States, made up of 56 national and international unions, together representing more than 11 million workers...

. He meets Paula Montefiore, a displaced intellectual from a Kafkaesque Eastern Europe, who is seeking to make a new life in the United States. The two characters confront each other about the meaning of the American dream.