The real Flos and Alices of the world; America's diner waitresses are the stars of Candacy Taylor's new coffee table book, 'Counter Culture.'

To create "Counter Culture: The American Coffee Shop Waitress," Candacy Taylor's master's thesis-turned-coffee-table book, the writer spent the last decade crisscrossing the United States, interviewing women over age 50 who had spent their working lives in American diners. As a result, "Counter Culture" combines 26,000 miles of chance encounters, heavy research, snippets of oral history and more than 100 new and archival photos to fashion a surprisingly complex portrait of a thoroughly unglamorous occupation.

But Taylor's favorite part might be the timely subtext.

"I do believe on some level that these women are a vanishing subculture," Taylor said in a recent phone interview. "This is the perfect time for this book, because it really celebrates hardworking people who have pride in what they're doing. Doing this project really helped me to redefine what success is."

That...