The dominant critical consensus of Henry Green’s fiction is that it is anti-mimetic and abstracted from society, a starting point that invariably cuts off any reflection about the correspondences between Green’s novels and social conditions. This article examines Living and argues that a deeper understanding of its structure, meaning, and thematic can be acquired by considering its relationship to the particular working-class conditions and culture of 1920s Birmingham. The analysis considers the novel’s worker-employee relationships and its specific use of language from this vantage point. Living is also an interesting example of a regional modernist novel set within an urban center, a type of novel that modernist scholars have largely overlooked.