"Words should heat you, they should make you rise up out of your chair and move!" - Meridel LeSueur This celebrated novel by one of the leading radical women writers of the twentieth century is reissued in a format designed for the general reader. Written in 1939, first published in 1978 (by West End Press), The Girl explores the fate of a farm girl who moves to the "dark city" of St. Paul, Minnesota, where she struggles to survive the death of her lover, killed in a bank robbery, and to give birth to her daughter, her hope for a new generation. Meridel LeSueur (1900-1996) was one of the great women literary voices of the twentieth century. She described her own roots as springing from "preachers, abolitionists, agrarians, radical lawyers on the Lincoln, Illinois, circuit. Dissenters and democrats and radicals through five generations." Her writings were grounded in these stories of working people, the poor, the disenfranchised, the dispossessed. She captures history as a living, moving entity in our lives. Written in the 1930s, The Girl was originally published in 1978. This book is a new edition and a reprint of the original literary work, containing new essays by family members and a new foreword by Margaret Randall, a poet, translator, and social activist, setting the novel in current social and historical context. NOTE TO READER This book is written in the vernacular of the era, with no quote marks. WHAT READERS HAVE SAID "... The strength of all the women in this novel is astounding when you read what is not even mentioned. This is a subtle yet powerful book." "Le Sueur seems in love with the spoken word, and her consummate achievement as an artist, I believe, is her transformation of colloquial speech into musical prose. In The Girl ...common street talk turns into exquisite poetic refrains." -- Blanche Gelfant, New York Times Book Review "Meridel Le Sueur's work stands, urgent and unique, at that 'bloody crossroads' where politics and culture meet...Modernist literary experimentalism engages a distinctelvly feminist conception of how people defend themselves and organze for change." -- Paul Lauter, A. K. and G. M. Smith Professor of Literature, Trinity College