Meridel Le Sueur

Meridel Le Sueur was an American writer associated with the proletarian literature movement of the 1930s and 1940s. Born as Meridel Wharton, she assumed the name of her mother's second husband, Arthur Le Sueur, the former Socialist mayor of Minot, North Dakota. Her writings—including journalistic pieces, short stories, and poetry—often dealt with the everyday lives of working-class women. She wrote from a perspective shaped by Marxist and feminist ideas. Her best-known works include the 1932 essay “Women on the Breadlines” and the novel The Girl. Le Sueur’s close association with Communist organizations eventually led to her being blacklisted in the 1950s during the Cold War. This sharply reduced the amount of work she was able to publish. Interest in her work revived in the 1970s and 1980s, when scholars and second-wave feminists reassessed her contributions to American radical and feminist literature.