Introduction

Abstract In late April 1975, as Lillian Robinson reports in a review essay titled “The Vietnam Syndrome,” Tillie Olsen read Tell Me a Riddle at the State University of New York at Buffalo. As she and Robinson headed over to the reception after the reading, someone ran up to tell Robinson that the United States had begun the final evacuation of Saigon, and she passed the news on to Olsen. “A few minutes later, when we were gathered around her with our hors d’oeuvres and drinks,” Robinson continues, “she [Olsen] made the announcement. ‘You did this,’ she added portentously to the group of students and young faculty, the kind of people who embodied the antiwar movement. ‘You must never forget that you did this. You must not let them take your history from you, the way they did with my generation, the generation of the thirties”’ (60). Meridel Le Sueur’s life and work has embodied the same declaration— “You must not let them take your history from you” to the working class and unemployed, especially women. In the afterword to The Girl, for example, Le Sueur describes the novel as a “memorial” to working class women of the Depression whose voices she wanted to preserve and says the novel “was really written by them.” This study, a response to Olsen and Le Sueur’s cautionary declaration, contributes to a retrieving and revisioning of the ‘30s American Left1 as well as to efforts to promote working-class writing as a legitimate category of literary analysis.2