West End Press formed in 1976 with the support of Meridel Le Sueur, one of the leading agitators and popularizers of peoples culture from the thirties. To her, a new alliance of working people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds with socially conscious middle class people represented the hope of America. Her stories and novels reflected the aspirations of the American underclass to assert its historic role as the true genius of the nation.

Our task became one of representing some of these unheard voices. Among our first publications were two volumes of the short stories of Meridel Le Sueur, Harvest (1976) and Song for My Time (1976), and her depression-era novel of St. Paul, The Girl (1978).

Our other early books by working-class writers included Drophammer, a play set in a factory by Emanuel Fried (1977); Story of Glass, poems by the young Pittsburgh glass worker Peter Oresick (1977); and Ransack, a novel of work on a wrecking crew in Cincinnati by urban activist Mike Henson (1980).

At the same time, we published first volumes of poetry by younger writers. These volumes included Take One Blood Red Rose by Appalachian poet Mary Joan Coleman; Lift These Shadows from My Eyes by African American poet Rosemary Mealy; We Will Make a River by Tulsa poet, activist, and minister Mary MacAnally; and Speaking in Sign by Oklahoma poet Teresa Anderson. All these books were published in 1978.

Teresa Anderson also translated the posthumous volume by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, A Call for the Destruction of Nixon (1980), in the book’s authorized edition. Writing in 1973, Neruda foresaw the fascist coup that resulted in the murder of Chilean president Salvador Allende and hastened his own death in September of that year.

Around the same time we published In a Land of Plenty, poems and tracts by the Appalachian farmer, preacher, and educator Don West (1982), and If You Want To Know What We Are, the collected stories, essays, and poems of Filipino American activist Carlos Bulosan (1983). Finally we published a pamphlet of poems by radical poet Thomas McGrath, Longshot O’Leary Counsels Direct Action (1983).

Our concern with peoples culture helped open us to the literature of personal experience. Meridel Le Sueur introduced us to Sharon Doubiago, an outspoken writer who sought to comprehend America as a whole in her epic poem Hard Country (1982). The book won praise from many quarters. Carolyn Forche wrote, “Sharon Doubiago is a complex of occasions, a brilliant response to Whitman, an American poet, free, spiritual, and gifted.”