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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.
The author of the Introduction to this edition, 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.”
— Paul Lauter, Trinity College
Meridel Le Sueur was born to socialist parents in 1900 and lived to be 96, spending most of her life in the middle west. She has been recognized as one of the leading proletarian short story writers of the 1930s, and her work includes short stories, novels, children’s books, poetry, and nonfiction.
Blacklisted during the McCarthy Period, Le Sueur’s contribution to American literature faded for nearly 30 years, gaining renewed prominence in the mid-1970s.