A History of American Literature

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Making It New: 1900–1945 461

to concentrate on female experience. But “the cause of women will be the cause of
all toiling humanity,” she insists; and her notion is of everyone eventually being born
into “a complete new body,” biological and spiritual, personal and social, with men
and women enjoying “a polarity of equals,” “a dialectic of equal opposites.” Le Sueur
explored these notions in her short stories, her novel The Girl (written in 1939,
published in 1978) based on tales of women she had known, her history of the
Midwest based on folk materials, North Star Country (1945), and her autobiographical
pieces, some of which were collected in Salute to Spring (1940). She also explored
them in her journalism, some of which is also found in Salute to Spring. “Written on
the Breadlines” (1932), for example, describes “the suffering of endless labor without
dream” in a Depression where “like every commodity now the body is difficult to
sell.” “I Was Marching,” perhaps Le Sueur’s most famous piece of reportage, recalls
her involvement in the Minneapolis trucker’s strike in 1934. “In these terrible
happenings you cannot be neutral now,” Le Sueur observes of that strike; and, as
she charts the stages of her participation in the collective effort, she presents a sense
of fusing with a larger reality. “For the first time in my life,” she concludes, “I Was
Marching,” “I feel most alive and yet ... not ... separate.” Mixing political comment
and narrative cunning, the report is a startling anticipation of later New Journalism;
it is also animated, as all her work is, by a belief in what she later described as
the “ circular” and the “continuous” – the repetition of each life in every other, the
sourcing of all bodies in the one.
For a while, during the Cold War period, Le Sueur fell out of fashion and suffered
harassment for her political views. She still wrote, however; notably, a piece based on
a period when she traveled across America by bus. “The Dark of the Time” (1956),
as it is called, describes a people “in the dark of capitalism,” experiencing the
bewilderment attendant on postwar anxiety and racial tension. “The source of
American culture lies in the historic movement of our people,” Le Sueur concludes
this essay, “and the artist must become voice, messenger, awakener, sparking the
inflammable silence, reflecting back the courage and the beauty.” It is the perennial
American idea of the writer as a prophetic voice of the people. And in her later work,
as she came back into some degree of recognition from the 1970s on, she has
attempted to be just that. Apart from reflecting a renewed interest in Native American
culture (Le Sueur began around this time to live among American Indians and work
for Indian land rights), this later writing rejects linear narrative and conventional
form – which are seen as the products of an overly purposive, appropriative view of
the world – in favor of structures founded on the circular and the cyclical, repetition
and reclamation. So the poetry recalls the line of Whitman or Native American
chant, and other works like “The Origins of Corn” (1976) are a multidimensional,
multilayered blend of prose and poetry, in which words, figures, and images return
again and again, recalling the fruits of the earth and the body they celebrate. For all
the alterations of form, though, and the expansion of source and subjects, Le Sueur’s
central concerns remain the same: women and the land, their centuries of parallel
suffering and exploitation, the hope of rebirth and renewal offered by both. “Let us
all return,” she once wrote, and that impulse of returning, to origins, the grounds of

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