The Old Town Bar has been on East 18th Street in New York City since 1892. Today, it serves businessmen lunch by day and yuppies drinks late into the night. But one can easily imagine another time, three-quarters of a century ago, when it would not be unusual to see the mayor or the governor of New York belly up to the bar for some liquid refreshment deep in the age of Prohibition. For the Old Town is just a block away from the old Tammany Hall Building on Union Square, where much of Empire Rising, Tom Kelly's new novel just out from Farrar, Straus & Giroux, takes place. Tammany was dedicated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1929 and through its doorway go many of Kelly's historic characters, including FDR himself, New York City's jazz mayor, Jimmy Walker, Governor Al Smith, and the still enigmatically gone-but-not-forgotten Judge Joseph Force Crater.

Seated at a quiet table in the back, Kelly looks like the last guy you'd like to have a barroom confrontation with. Tall and beefy, he is dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, a baseball cap covers his bald head. He looks exactly like what he was before he became a novelist—a sandhog, one of the legion of manual workers who dig New York's tunnels.

The tough veneer masks a man who loves words and who becomes animated as the talk turns to the construction of the Empire State Building in 1930—the subject of Empire Rising—the working stiffs who built it and the finely coiffed politicians who got rich off it. It is a book about the haves, the have-nots, and how they collide in pursuit of an American pot of gold on West 34th Street. It is populated with famous pols—most of whom have their hand in the public trough. "I'm a big fan of FDR the president," says Kelly, "but in 1930 he was kind of the George W. Bush of his day. He was considered a rich kid, dilettante, idiot. He was very calculating, backstabbing. His relationship with [Al] Smith is worth five novels right there. Walker I just love. Jimmy Walker to me is this beautiful combination. He's theIrish-American in my eyes. So infused by Ireland, but so American. He was this incredible character, a very good guy at heart, but just couldn't say no to anybody. The corruption was just unbelievable. I think if there's any consistent theme in my writing," Kelly says emphatically, "it's corruption. I'm fascinated by corruption on all levels. It's part of the human condition and how people react to it when they're facing it."

The transition from day laborer to novelist has not been an easy one for the 42-year-old Kelly. His father, a career railroad worker, was a high school dropout, as were Kelly's brothers. Kelly himself, although a voracious reader as a teenager, barely got out of high school with a D average, despite his father's constant admonition: "Get an education." He went to California to find work, but when his father died in 1983, the old man's words began to haunt him. "With typical Irish guilt, I felt so awful that I never did the one thing he wanted. So I started taking night classes at a junior college in California. I did very well and transferred to Fordham." Kelly graduated from Fordham, was a Rhodes Scholar finalist, and then earned a master's degree from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He went on to work for the Teamsters and became an advanceman for New York City mayor David Dinkins. But all the time he yearned to be a novelist—an ambition he dreamed of from boyhood. "There was a point in there where I put Paybackaside for a couple of years, where I wasn't writing. It just ate at me because that's what I wanted to do." A chance encounter at a Michigan wedding gave him an introduction to agent Nat Sobel. It was, as they say in Casablanca, the beginning of a beautiful friendship. When he returned to New York Kelly looked Sobel up in the phone book and gave him a buzz. "He says send me the first 50 pages. I say great, I'll just drop it off. I wake up the next morning and there's a message on the machine, 'Kelly, Sobel. Read the first 50 pages, bring me the rest.' " The result was Payback, a novel about the sandhogs, published by Knopf in 1997. Rackets, a story about union corruption, was published in 2001 by FSG.

All of Kelly's heroes are laborers and there's a reason for that. "The primary reason is there's almost zero portrayal of working people in fiction in America in any media," he says. "And if there is, it's the fat plumber showing the crack of his ass on television, and it's infuriating to me. Most people who write think people who work with their hands are monkeys because they've never done that, they don't know anyone who's done that, they've never had an uncle who was a carpenter. There's an absolute ignorance about the complexities of physical work, on many levels. If you ever look at Hollywood, if they ever do working-class people, gritty equals grim. They never get the whole humor; they don't get working-class people at all."

Although now a full-time writer, Kelly remains a staunch union man. "I still go to meetings," he says proudly, dropping his union cards on the table for inspection. "I still work a few days. I miss physical work. It's just nice to get out." As he gathers his union cards and puts them back in his wallet, a smile crosses Kelly face. "To this day," he says in a quiet, ambivalent voice, "I still feel like writing is not work. And it's really not a good thing. I love what I'm doing and I'm glad I getting paid to do it, but it's almost like I'm cheating somehow. It's bizarre—writing a novel is a helluva lot harder than driving tunnel."