Meridel Le Sueur was an American writer associated with the proletarian movement of the 1930s and 1940s. Born as Meridel Wharton, she assumed the name of her mother's second husband, Arthur Le Sueur, former Socialist mayor of Minot, North Dakota

Minot, North Dakota

Minot is a city located in north central North Dakota in the United States. It is most widely known for the Air Force base located approximately 15 miles north of the city. With a population of 40,888 at the 2010 census, Minot is the fourth largest city in the state...

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Life and career

Le Sueur was born into a family of social and political activists. Her grandfather was a supporter of the Protestant fundamentalist temperance movement. Le Sueur was heavily influenced by poems and stories that she heard from Native American women. She dropped out of high school and attended the American Academy of Dramatic Art. She worked in Hollywood as an actress, stuntwoman, writer and journalist. She wrote for liberal newspapers about unemployment, migrant workers, and the Native American fight for autonomy.

Like other writers of the period such as John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck

John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was an American writer. He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden and the novella Of Mice and Men...

, Nelson Algren

Nelson Algren

Nelson Algren was an American writer.-Early life:Algren was born Nelson Ahlgren Abraham in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Goldie and Gerson Abraham. At the age of three he moved with his parents to Chicago, Illinois where they lived in a working-class, immigrant neighborhood on the South Side...

 and Jack Conroy

Jack Conroy

Jack Conroy a leftist American writer, also known as a Worker-Writer, and was best known for his contributions to “proletarian literature,” fiction and nonfiction about the life of American workers during the early decades of the 20th century.-Background:He was born John Wesley Conroy to Irish...

, Le Sueur wrote about the struggles of the working class during the Great Depression

Great Depression

The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...

. She published articles in the New Masses and The American Mercury

The American Mercury

The American Mercury was an American magazine published from 1924 to 1981. It was founded as the brainchild of H. L. Mencken and drama critic George Jean Nathan. The magazine featured writing by some of the most important writers in the United States through the 1920s and 1930s...

.

Her best known books are North Star Country (1945), a people’s history of Minnesota

Minnesota

Minnesota is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States. The twelfth largest state of the U.S., it is the twenty-first most populous, with 5.3 million residents. Minnesota was carved out of the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory and admitted to the Union as the thirty-second state...

, and the novel The Girl

The Girl

The Girl is a novel by Meridel Le Sueur set during Prohibition and chronicling the development of a young woman from a naive small-town girl into a participant in a bank robbery....

, which was written in the 1930s but not published until 1978. In the 1950s, Le Sueur was blacklisted as a communist, but her reputation was revived in the 1970s, when she was hailed as a proto-feminist for her writings in support of women’s rights. She also wrote on Goddess spirituality in a poetry volume titled Rites of Ancient Ripening, which was illustrated by her daughter. In her later years, Le Sueur lived in St. Paul, MN, and wrote popular children’s biographies, most notably Nancy Hanks of Wilderness Road.

An occasional actor in films, she turned to the writing of children's books, notably, The Story of Davy Crockett and The Story of Johnny Appleseed. She was blacklisted during the 1950s for her membership in the Communist Party

Communist party

A political party described as a Communist party includes those that advocate the application of the social principles of communism through a communist form of government...

. Le Sueur was active in a variety of antiwar and left-wing causes and is commemorated in Minneapolis, Minnesota

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Minneapolis , nicknamed "City of Lakes" and the "Mill City," is the county seat of Hennepin County, the largest city in the U.S. state of Minnesota, and the 48th largest in the United States...

, in the Meridel Le Sueur building in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood.

"Women on the Breadlines"

The short 1932 piece "Women on the Breadlines" is one of Le Sueur's most recognized proleterian works. Here, LeSueur wrote of the struggles that women faced during the Depression Era and how they were confined to limiting roles. While most of the characters presented in this work are struggling women searching for work, some are depicted as having nowhere to go but to "work in the streets." Through this and other works, LeSueur opened the door for future female artists that wanted to write confrontational poetry, mediating the personal and the political.

External links

• Meridel Le Sueur archive at the Minnesota Historical Society
• Women & Marxism