In his debut novel American Rust, Philipp Meyer hopes to shed some light on a story that has taken a backseat to the news of Wall Street job losses. His story is less glamorous in that it doesn’t include foreclosures on Upper East Side apartments or repossessions of swanky private jets, but it’s one that has affected a larger proportion of Americans – his story is about the deterioration of society in the cities that rely on heavy industry.

Raised in Baltimore, 34-year-old Meyer, himself a former Wall Street shark, says that when the economic crisis reared its ugly head “the Wall Street job losses got most of the attention. But the real job losses have been in manufacturing.”

“The book is certainly a story I needed to tell about America. I think as a society America has not dealt with the causes of globalisation in our own country. Certainly globalisation benefits you if you’re a stockholder, but the larger social and economical costs are enormous and we haven’t faced up to that yet,” he says.

Meyer’s novel is set in the fictional Pennsylvanian town of Buell, on the non-fictional Monongahela river. The town is struggling with the closure of its steel factories (hence the title), and the book addresses the effects of unemployment and subsequent poverty on its residents. Two of the likeliest people to escape the town are 20-year-old best friends Poe (for his sporting prowess) and Isaac English (for his intellectual brilliance).

Despite their respective talents they do not follow Isaac's sister Lee to an East Coast college, as many of Buell’s residents predicted they would. While Isaac stays caring for his stoic father, who was injured in an industrial accident, Poe simply lacks motivation.

On the day Isaac finally decides to leave town, with a stolen wad of his father’s cash in his pocket, he and Poe are caught in a terrible act of violence resulting in the death of a homeless man. While Isaac continues on his journey, Poe is suspected of the murder by police and winds up in jail awaiting trial.

In terms of unemployment, business closures and crime, the novel’s setting is similar in many ways to Hampden, the neighbourhood Meyer grew up in. It’s not surprising, then, that Meyer drew on his experiences living there as inspiration for the book.

“Being surrounded by blue collar folks must have had some influence. Many of the events in American Rust are drawn, or inspired, from growing up there. For example, one of my neighbour’s friends killed a guy in a bar fight and his friend ended up going to prison and dying there and that directly influenced the beginning of the book where Isaac kills someone to protect his friend,” Meyer says.

In its heyday, in the 1940s and ‘50s, Baltimore was a thriving industrial powerhouse. “It’s now one of the stereotypical crumbling north-eastern cities,” Meyer says. “It’s quite poor. Baltimore’s population has been shrinking steadily since the 1960s, the place has been hemorrhaging jobs for so long. For most people it’s seen as a poor and violent place.”

Baltimore, like other heavy industry-reliant cities, is feeling the American Dream slip through its fingers.

“The idea of the American Dream is the same as it has always been – the ability to achieve anything no matter where you come from,” Meyer says. “What’s certainly changed in the last 30 years is that there are fewer types of jobs. For instance, there aren’t those high paid manufacturing jobs anymore. There are very few jobs where you can make something with your hands to earn a wage that will support your family...But that’s just a gut feeling, that’s what I’ve got from living in these places”.

Ironically, Meyer appears to have achieved the elusive dream. Born to hippy parents in a poor Baltimore neighbourhood, he dropped out of school when he was 16 and worked a variety of odd jobs, including bicycle mechanic and volunteer at Baltimore’s Shock Trauma Center. By the age of 20, he decided he wanted to be a writer, and two years later he was accepted into Ivy League university Cornell, in Ithaca, New York. His college experience was almost identical to Lee’s in the book.

“When I got into Cornell it was a transformative moment in my life. [Before going] I didn’t necessarily feel alone, but maybe there weren’t that many people like me – which is just what Lee feels [in Buelle]. And going to Cornell there were all these other people just like me who had these same hopes and the world just became far, far broader than it had been living in this little narrow universe in Baltimore,” he says.

“There was probably a bit of nervousness about how I was going to be received. What I found out quite quickly is that people just didn’t care, I think it was quite different 30 years ago, when there was an enforced class system (at least that’s what I heard from people who went there then),” he says.

In a piece he wrote for the UK newspaper The Independent, Meyer says that growing up he and his brother lived a “split existence”, soaking up literature and classical music in the confines of their home and causing trouble out on the streets.

“My earliest memory of Hampden is meeting the neighbourhood kids and having a rock battle, this was the entertainment. I was a little sensitive so it was slightly shocking but I participated anyway. That was a good introduction to the way things were, a little rough and tumble,” he says.

Meyer describes Baltimore as kitschy but cultured. “I lived in Austin Texas for a few years, and even though Austin is about the same size, Baltimore has far more museums, even though it’s a much poorer city,” he says.

“If I were to sell it to an out-of-towner I would say it’s got a lot of old interesting architecture and a lot of immigrant culture. There are many beautiful neighbourhoods within Baltimore. In many ways it’s a city of little villages. Filmmaker John Waters sets a lot of his movies there,” says Meyer.

Likewise, award-winning Baltimorean author Laura Lippman, best known for her Tess Monaghan series of crime novels believes Baltimore can be “quite a fun town if you have the right guide,” stealing a line from the film version of The Silence of the Lambs. She says it’s illogical to love Baltimore, as it’s poor and rife with crime and corruption, but she does anyway.

Lippman's latest novel, Life Sentences, is a mystery with racial undertones, a theme she feels “honour bound” to write about.

“There's a race reality in Baltimore. It's a city where a minority, African-Americans, are the majority now, and whites have not always been gracious about this. It's a very poor city, with vast numbers of African-American men who are so chronically unemployed that they don't even figure into the unemployment statistics.

“The public schools need a lot of help. If I could fix one thing, I'd fix the schools. Good public schools would solve a lot of those problems,” says Lippman.

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Two weeks ago, over 800 American journalists converged on Baltimore for the annual Investigative Reporters and Editors conference. It was a sobering affair with many attendees (some recently made redundant) pondering the question, is journalism dead?

Meyer certainly hopes not. While he thinks fiction can potentially be more truthful than the non-fiction when exploring larger issues, he also believes all forms of media and communication have their place.

“Novels or television and movies can bring you into the lives and psyches of people who you might not have that much sympathy for otherwise,” he says, “But journalism is needed to tell stories about politics.”

“The reason I didn’t bring politics into American Rust was because I think you have to be true and honest about things and people can smell when you’ve got a political agenda, people can sense when things are not true. For example, when you have characters that are not very politically aware making political statements, I think that turns people off, it doesn’t really happen in real life,” he says.

Fifty-five-year-old Lippman, once a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, Maryland's major daily newspaper, finds it easier to get valuable information out of the police department now as a novelist than when she was a journalist.

“Most novelists find it remarkably easy to get people to talk to them even if they have no standing relationship. Much easier than when I was a journalist, that's for certain,” she says.

“[However] it's a sad fact that many citizens distrust Baltimore police and, in some neighbourhoods, I'm afraid that distrust is earned,” she says.

Lippman is married to David Simon, the creator and head writer of the critically acclaimed television series, The Wire, which offers a frank representation of institutional dysfunction in Baltimore.

“It's nice to be married to someone who understands the writing life, and what it's like to be reviewed, or go on tour...however, some Wire fans think they see things in my work that just aren't there,” says Lippman.

Both Lippman and Meyer attended the Sydney Writers Festival last month. At Meyer's event, host Geordie Williamson compared American Rust to the work of Simon and fellow Wire writer George Pelecanos due to its realistic portrayal of the underbelly of American society, and the effects of widespread, chronic unemployment.

With the economic crisis forcing American heavy industry to trim even more fat, the survival skills of cities like Baltimore and Pennsylvania are being put to the test. “I’m not that hopeful that they’ll bounce back,” says Meyer. It seems the future is grim for America’s once booming industrial cities but promising for its talented writers.