The Girl

Revised Edition

Meridel Le Sueur

This best selling novel by a radical woman author of the twentieth century has been reissued with a new introduction by Linda Ray Pratt. The novel explores the fate of a farm girl who moves to the “dark city” of St. Paul, Minnesota, where she struggles to survive the death of her lover, killed in a bank robbery, and give birth to her daughter, the hope of a new generation.

Linda Ray Pratt, professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, has also written the introduction to the 2004 edition of Tillie Olsen’s novel Yonnondio: from the Thirties.

“Le Sueur seems in love with the spoken word, and her consummate achievement as an artist, I believe, is her transformation of colloquial speech into musical prose. In The Girl . . . common street talk turns into exquisite poetic refrains.”—Blanche Gelfant, New York Times Book Review

“Meridel Le Sueur’s work stands, urgent and unique, at that ‘bloody crossroads’ where politics and culture meet. Modernist literary experimentalism engages a distinctively feminist conception of how people defend themselves and organize for change.”—Paul Lauter, Trinity College

5 x 8 inches • 192 pages • ISBN 0-9753486-5-5 • $13.95