At the height of COVID-19 pandemic, Maximillian Alvarez conducted a series of intimate interviews with workers of various stripes, from all around the United States-from Kyle, a sheet metal worker in Kentucky; to Mx. Pucks, a burlesque performer and producer in Seattle; to Nick, a gravedigger in New Jersey. As in his widely celebrated podcast, Working People, Alvarez spoke with them not just about their jobs, but about their lives, dreams, and struggles, and about their experiences living through a year when the world itself seemed to break apart. The conversations documented in these pages are at times meandering, sometimes funny or philosophical, occasionally punctured by pain so deep that it hurts to read them, and they all deserve to be heard, to be remembered. The Work of Living is a deeply human history of one of the defining events of the twenty-first century, told by the people who lived it.